Fujitsu has announced the launch of its Vendor Collaboration Suite (VCS) for the retail industry. This suite provides a collaborative approach to managing all interactions in a retailer-vendor relationship. Fujitsu VCS solution addresses the unique nature of retailer-vendor interactions by providing a visual development platform which allows rapid automation and integration of complex business processes and workflows. Retailers have the flexibility to host Fujitsu VCS as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) either on Public clouds or on an On-premise Java platform. Fujitsu VCS can be switched between Cloud and on-premise with ‘zero’ impact or change. The retail ready features of the solution combined with a user based pricing model, will lead to retailers realizing cost savings as their vendor base and number of business process grow. Retailers who are already using portal ware or Business Process Management (BPM) can look towards extending their future needs through a seamless integration with the Fujitsu VCS solution.
“Fujitsu is committed to leveraging its 30 year global retail expertise at over 500 retailers to bring innovative solutions to the Indian retail sector. The best-of-breed technology framework of the VCS solution, offers retailers lower total cost of Ownership (TCO) and an opportunity to convert capital to operating expenditure in the investment phase,” said Rajeev Gupta, President, Fujitsu Consulting India.
Sunil Bhave, Vice President, Fujitsu Consulting India, said “In a competitive retail industry, vendor collaboration is an important aspect. VCS provides an economical approach to holistically enable retail-vendor collaboration by allowing integration of complex business processes. Retailers can deploy this solution with no or minimal disturbance to their technology framework. The extent of vendor collaboration in various areas of the retail value chain goes beyond just the automation of transactions and VCS helps achieve this objective”.
Retailer interactions with its vendor base is evolving significantly over the years from being earlier confined to the purchasing function to now moving towards collaboration in the areas of new product introductions, store sales and stock visibility, shopper marketing and space planning. Retailers have adopted various hues of technology such as portals, ERP extensions and BPM to manage these interactions. These have met with limited successes due to cost implications when processes, organization structure and IT systems change in a retail organization.
Fujitsu VCS solution can be used for vendor interactions in the areas of planning, onboarding, purchasing, vendor contract, shopper promotions, payables and store reporting. Fujitsu will also handhold the customer through the collaboration process through a pilot for key vendors and then a rollout to the entire vendor base. Key features of Fujitsu’s VCS solution include features such as retail organization structure with role based permissions, product category based visibility and execution, audit trails, secure vendor access, ERP integration, SLA based execution, e-mail integration, dashboards etc.