Eight out of 10 retail clients are seeking to deliver their business plans faster than ever and are also open to 100% offshoring to meet these goals, said Abhijit Niyogi, vice president and business unit head – retail UK & Europe, TCS.

“Since the (Covid-19) pandemic, the decision-making process around technology and business transformation in Europe has accelerated. There was also a mindset change where the leaders (clients) realised that they don’t have the luxury of time for these transformation programmes,” Niyogi said.

Despite geopolitical and macroeconomic issues, this transformation journey is not slowing down as far as fiscal year 2023 spending plans are concerned, he added.

“Most retailers created a three-year roadmap for their digital journey and everyone wants to aggressively deliver that within two years or even 1.5 years in some cases…It is a question of how fast we can deliver it… they are even asking if we can deliver 100% from offshore,” Niyogi said.

TCS recently completed part of one such large multi-year HR transformation project to migrate 27 million records for UK-based clothing retailer M&S’ employees working across 1,450 locations in the UK.

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“Around 3-4 years back, before the pandemic, the M&S leadership team was looking for how they could really create differentiating solutions for their HR workflows across 75-80,000 people including head office stores and various distribution centres. They even visited India to see how TCS managed its 4,50,000 odd employees, at that time, through similar processes,” he said.

TCS has seen clients being open to improving unit prices and per employee costs to ensure that they have the best engineering talent to meet their targeted technology goals.

As of the first quarter, TCS’ retail and Consumer Packaged Goods vertical comprises 16% of its revenue stream and it grew 25% on a constant currency basis over the past year.

India’s largest IT services provider by revenue has been a strategic partner to M&S for over a decade across numerous technology and transformation programmes. Using those blueprints, the team built a modern, flexible, and scalable cloud-based solution using the Oracle HCM suite.

“TCS’ transformation readiness-led approach helped us prepare, plan and successfully deliver our HR transformation programme and improve the employee experience,” said Mark Dickson, chief technology officer – group support, M&S.