Bangalore helped Tesco engineer a success story | Economic Times

If there was one company that did not face any pandemic-related blues last year, it was British retailer Tesco.Online sales went up by 82%, while in-store sales rose 40% - meaning that it went from processing about 600,000 orders a week to 1.5 million, all within a few weeks.The increase in volumes resulted in Tesco having to hire nearly 48,000 new employees across locations, a 150% volume increase in payroll processing.To make sure that the systems did not collapse under the increased load, the work needed at the backend was handled out of India by a team that had also switched to working remotely in the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak.“This is where Bengaluru came into play, to help and support with the recruitment, doing all the paperwork processing, setting up the payroll… it was complex because people were doing extra shifts so we had to look at overtime,” said Sumit Mitra, CEO, Tesco Business Services and Tesco Bengaluru.Tesco has been in India for nearly two decades and the work done here has evolved from cost saving and offshoring services to driving several important initiatives for the 100-year-old retail firm.“There are about 6,000 Tesco stores around the world and the design of every single store is done from Bengaluru – from the carpark to the layout of the back office, the whole architectural design on the place - as well as any refurbishments that may be required - are done from here,” said Mitra.The India technology centre also works on store display and merchandising, where the analytics of how products are to be positioned at the store are handled by the Bengaluru-based team. Globally, the company buys products worth 38 million pounds from 190 countries, and the buyer contracts, commercial reconciliation and all parts of the buyer lifecycle process are managed from the city.“Five years ago, we were 80% services, but things have changed in the last three and half years or so and now it’s 80% engineering,” said Mitra.Tesco Bengaluru has created a software system to manage the retail tills across stores where problems can be solved remotely from India.“Eighty percent of inventions like coding, engineering, and developing new features are done by a team in Bengaluru,” he said. The team has also created a GPS tracking app for deliveries - Bumble Bee - which helps determine the best routes and order of deliveries for the driver.The company is now working to upskill its existing workforce to meet the changing demands of new technology. Tesco recently implemented 300 bots to take over the more repetitive administrative tasks, freeing up nearly 900 people. “We haven’t made any redundancies, these employees are now being retrained to do more value-added work,” said Mitra.Even as the volume of work being done out of India is likely to increase, the company will not be adding more people, preferring instead to use technology and upskill its existing workforce.Global inhouse centres, said Mitra, have the potential to directly impact the company’s revenues, and once the conversation shifts to how they can make a difference, more companies will start doing high-end work that directly impacts business outcomes from here.