Archies was started as ‘Archies Greeting and Gifts Pvt Ltd’ in the year 1979. With the basic background of printing greeting cards and cine-stars calendar, the company evolved into the ‘Hallmark’ of India. Later, the company became a public limited company. By 2002 the company had strengthen its stable of goodies by adding multiple products like gifts, perfumes, music cassettes, photo albums, etc. So, keeping with the corporate image the two words ‘greetings and gifts’ were dropped from the name. With a small turnover of Rs. 40 Crore in 1995, it has achieved a turn over of Rs. 104 Crore in the year 2006-2007 and 195 Cr in 2015-16. This is despite of the fact that Archies is facing deadly competition from e-greetings in various electronic messaging systems.
In the year 2005, Archies had 9 divisions, 11 distribution offices, 40 company owned stores, and around 500 franchisee stores in the country. The company was vertically divided into major division viz. 1) Helpage cards division, 2) CRY-card division, 3) gift division, 4) perfume division, 5) photo-album division, 6) paper-rose division, 7) stationery division, 8) printing division and 9) archiesonline.com (an e-greetings division). All nine divisions run as separate revenue centres. The 11 distribution office across the country catered to the logistics requirement of 500 odd retail shops.
Keeping pace with the retail boom, the company increased its number of stores to 100 by the year 2008 from 40 stores in 2002. Archies also recognized the importance of internet and how it can restructure the businesses. Keeping pace with technology the ecommerce division www.archiesonline.com was created. Therefore, calling Archies an ‘original’ Indian retailer will not be an exaggeration.
Problems become complex as the company grows bigger. Archies management was always techno-savvy. As back as 1989 they had their inventory on computers. The distribution billing was computerized using a legacy software developed in-house. But by the time company was a 100-plus- stores-organization, it could not just rely on the FoxPro based legacy application. At stores level they needed proper electronic point of sales systems with user friendly software packages. The problem was not just billing and stock keeping at the store front, it was gathering of data, analysis of data, valuation of stock, preparation of statutory reports for investors and governments. Keeping a tab on stock movement, analyzing sales graph of each store etc. were crucial activities that Archies management could not do without. It was felt that to streamline these activities, Archies needed an ERP solution with strong POS interface.
So, the search began for the best, Indianized, comprehensive but cost-effective software package. A host of packages were evaluated, keeping in mind the requirements. Delivery and implementation time was also an important factor. The management zeroed on ‘eFacto’ from ‘BNG Infotech Pvt. Ltd.’ The vendor had a moderate presence in retail but not so good in ERP and a big retail chain organization. By looking at the product features during a series of demonstrations, the senior managers of Archies were convinced of the qualities and felt that it suited their purpose. Since the price was also attractive, so the monetary risks were minimal.
Archies commissioned IBM Servers with dual processors and RAID5 sytems having around 200 GB Harddisk and 2GB RAM. Almost 250 systems which were across their nine divisions at the corporate office were connected. Some of the divisions were not cabled, the WAN was established using RF (radio frequency) transmission system.
Though eFacto was not a big-league ERP application at that time, yet with a strong technical know-how and a stronger commitment to deliver, made it possible to implement the basic ERP modules with POS within a mind-boggling time span of three months. This included system analysis, customization (mostly hardcore which involved modification of the source code), data-porting and training to the staff. There were around 75 major changes and 100 reports that were redone. Even the basic structure of product coding was changed. But the strong will of the EDP team to implement a solution and relentless support of the vendor organization was key factors beneath the success of the project.
BNG Infotech customized its ERP and codenamed it ‘Revive’ to suit Archies’ requirements. In the first phase, four information systems were implemented viz. purchase, distribution, inventory and accounts. Purchase system took care of purchase order generation and vendor evaluation systems. Handheld data capture units were used for distribution billing. Inventory was streamline by converting the opening stock data from legacy systems. The product code was 20 digit long, which represented the country code, company code, product code, batch number. Similarly, finance and accounts were brought in into the same system, as they were earlier using Tally for accounts.
Since an ERP implementation involves change management in the organization, the constant support of senior management was key driver. An ERP Task Force (ETF) was created involving senior EDP and accounts managers of Archies and functional and technical heads of BNG Infotech, which closely monitored the progress.
With implementation of eFacto, every department and functional areas were brought under one integrated solution. Two IT engineers who were earlier working on just sending and receiving data from Tally to their old system, were put to better jobs. By automating all divisions and departments, the huge investments on RF and optical fiber connections for intranet was utilized. The MIS system generated analytical reports on sales and stock of every store. Matrix reports on divisions and products, divisions and segments were available to the top management.
