As a Consultant working with Retail Industry Solutions Unit of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Prasanna specializes in helping retailers assess the current performance of their business processes and identify any gaps that can be addressed through process or technology intervention. Prasanna works with leading retailers to develop solutions that help them remain competitive and relevant in the...

Since then, Tesco has expanded across the world. It now has over 2,200 stores including hypermarkets and Tesco Express outlets to meet different customer needs. As a conglomerate Tesco also offers alternative goods and services such as insurance, banking and online shopping. With net profits of around £3.4 billion Tesco has become the largest British retailer and one of the world's leading reta...

Mobile communication technology enables new forms of customer communication in the brick-and-mortar retailing by establishing electronic and individually designable channels of communication. Existing concepts and field trials of mobile customer communication show that the interrelation between mobile network technologies and potential business applications is still quite inadequate. In this co...

Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this working paper are the responsibility of the author alone. Introduction It has been highlighted that market positioning-based on a combination of price and product differentiation-can provide an important competitive advantage for commercial organisations (e.g. Day and Wensley, 1988). This is especially so within retailing, where effective positioning ca...

In this paper, we consider a realistic and meaningful scenario in the context of smart grids where an electricity retailer serves three different types of customers, i.e., customers with an optimal home energy management system embedded in their smart meters (C-HEMS), customers with only smart meters (C-SM), and customers without smart meters (C-NONE). The main objective of this paper is to sup...

Most marketers have difficulty in identifying the right customers to engage in successful campaigns. So far, customer segmentation is a popular method that is used for selecting appropriate customers for a launch campaign. Unfortunately, the link between customer segmentation and marketing campaign is missing. Another problem is that database marketers generally use different models to conduct ...

Trade promotions are temporary price cuts that manufacturers offer retailers to encourage them to reduce retail prices. While trade promotion spending as a percentage of marketing budget has increased dramatically, the inefficiency of trade promotion represents the ‘‘number-one concern’’ among manufacturers, as indicated by recent trade surveys. At the heart of this dissatisfaction lies manufac...

Efficient workforce scheduling has an important impact on store profit and customer service. Standard scheduling problems do not recognize the effect of staff availability on customer sales, however, even though the latter is an important factor in the retail sector. In this paper a two-stage model is proposed for this purpose. In the first stage a sales response model is used to specify hourly...

We demonstrate how bullwhip reduction principles generated through generic supply chain modelling have been used to tackle the bullwhip problem within Tesco, the largest UK grocery retailer. In the context of bullwhip research, this bridging between theory and practice has not been extensively demonstrated previously. The research involved examining the automated store ordering system, through ...