Homegrown IT success for 7-Eleven
Gosoft outgrows birthplace to think about global enterprise
The company responsible for the convenience-store giant's IT systems is Gosoft (Thailand), which began life as CP Seven Eleven's Information Technology Department and was spun off four years ago as a fully-fledged software company. CP Seven Eleven later became CP All, and Gosoft remains a wholly owned subsidiary.
Chief operations officer Kosa Pongsupath said the company had handled the complex core systems of 7-Eleven, dealing with 4,700 outlets, 1,100 customers visiting each outlet per day, 800 suppliers and a total of 1,100 product items sold in a day. It also covers additional services such as Smart Purse, Counter Service, Nok Air ticket bookings, money transfers and product deliveries.
"A retail business of 7-Eleven's size needs an intelligent IT system. It must deal with mass consumers, with a large number of product items and suppliers and with many outlets around the country offering a large number of services," he said.
An intelligent system helps 7-Eleven to be competitive, by giving it the ability to make "just-in-time" decisions and the capacity to adjust its business model, its marketing campaigns and its sales promotions. Importantly, it does this with the utmost accuracy.
"Retailing is a service business; it's not simply selling products at a shop. Therefore, retailers have to be adaptive and dynamic in order to respond to the market and customers' needs. We have been in this business for years, and that helps us to understand it well, and to design and develop IT systems to serve these needs," Kosa said.
Positioning itself as a business and solution-based IT provider, Gosoft has developed and provided 18 processes for 7-Eleven, covering the chain's entire IT systems and applications. These begin with product selection and include purchasing, distribution centre, network and logistic management, display, point-of-sale and store management, network and IT security management and an intelligent system for executive decision-making.
"For example, the system goes in deep to dig out each product item sold at any outlet at a certain time and records everything into the system, to support executive decision-making. IT enables the company to quickly add or remove product listings in and out of its database without affecting the whole system. This gives 7-Eleven more productivity and competitiveness," Kosa said.
As well as 7-Eleven, Gosoft has developed IT systems for all companies in CP All, including Counter Service, Retail Link, CP Retailing and Marketing and Thai Smart Card.
Moreover, its main business has grown to include provision of Internet data centre (IDC) services, as well as software development. Its IDC business currently serves the entire CP Group, including True Corporation, CP Food and CP All, as well as external customers such as Thai Airways International.
"There are about 10 customers in our IDC business that represent only 60 per cent of our tier-4 IDC's total capacity, which provides 99.99-per-cent of availability. We plan to build a new tier-3 IDC to serve small- and medium-sized enterprises this year," Kosa said.
Between 70 and 80 per cent of Gosoft's software development business is currently done within CP All. The rest serves outside customers.
"We have 100 developers and have been certified CMMi (Capability Maturity Model Integration) Level 3 since last September, after achieving CMM level 2 two years ago. Our 18 IT processes developed for 7-Eleven are also certified by ISO 2000," Kosa said.
With these capabilities, the company plans to offer software development services to global companies in overseas markets sometime in the future, he said.
0 comments:
Post a Comment