 During the past few years, the Czech retail industry has experienced a massive invasion of large foreign retail chains which has moved the majority of customers from local shops to new and modern supermarkets and hypermarkets.
Retailers are under all sorts of pressure. Investors have priced growth into their current valuation of the retail market and yet the retail marketplace has never been more complex or competitive. Some of the challenges retailers must conquer include:
- More demanding customers.
- Saturated home market.
- Product commoditization.
- Decreasing return on space.
- Price deflation.
- Competition from discount merchandisers.
To overcome these challenges, and to take advantage of the growth opportunities that exist in emerging markets (real and virtual), retailers must move rapidly toward high performance. Accenture research shows that high performance in retailing means organizing the business around the customer. The characteristics of high performance in retail are:
- Clear strategic intent: Developing a clear strategy and then aligning everything around it is a vital principle that is often not fully implemented.
- Talent management: High performance always depends on high performers.
- Obsessive customer focus: Translate customer understanding into differentiated strategies.
- Operational excellence: Information technology plays a key role here.
- Innovation and execution to value: The key is creating innovations that lead to value creation.
- Alliance and collaboration capability: Collaborate with both business partners and entities within the same group.
 The Czech practice has been active in SAP retail implementation in Poland. The client (Jeronimo Martins Dystribucja) is a very successful Portuguese-owned retail chain that was aware of its need to implement an efficient financial software that would it them acquire, process and report concise financial and logistics data.
Accenture's Prague office actively participated in organizationally restructuring the large British retail chain Tesco within the Czech Republic. Accenture's role was to develop a common "European" core financial system to replace the existing— yet less sophisticated—financial systems in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The project scope also included integrating Oracle Financials and the chain's new merchandising system, G.O.L.D., which was being developed in parallel with Oracle by a separate project team. The integration included developing interfaces between G.O.L.D. and Oracle GL and AP. Together with the client we prepared a solution that is tailored to Tesco's needs and delivered the following values/benefits:
- A more integrated financial system.
- More accurate and better quality reporting.
- More accurate asset management.
- More controlled and centralized purchasing.
Learn more about our global expertise in the retail industry and services Accenture offers in the Czech Republic. To Top |