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Here's How Decathlon Provides Hassle Free Shopping Experience With Phygital

In conversation with ETCIO, Joy Deep Tiwary, CIO, Decathlon-India, shares how the company is building phygital infrastructure and self-checkout retails stores to provide seamless customer experience.

With over 1,500 stores in 49 countries, Decathlon claims to be the largest sporting goods retailer in the world. The French company opened its first store in India in 2009. Today, the brand stands with 75 plus stores in the country. With an aim to reach 100 stores and to supply goods even in remote locations in India, Decathlon turns to tech and innovation.

In conversation with ETCIO, Joy Deep Tiwary, CIO, Decathlon- India, shares how bridging the gap between online and offline by building a phygital infrastructure has yielded the company more customers, hence more sales.

 

Building phygital stores

In a recent project, Decathlon launched self-checkout counter, which allows customers to scan and pay directly from the application, therebys providing them hassle-free shopping experience. The self checkout machines are simple to use and have provided the user with the benefit of time. The waiting time has been reduced as there are no more queues.

Sharing Decathlon's digital journey and strategy, Tiwary says that the strategy involves the retail store chain combining digital with physical to provide seamless experience to its customers.
 

Automation

Sharing the experience of having CRM systems in house, Tiwary says "We looked for partners and discussed with different companies but with the unique business model that we have, we were not able to find the fit match for it. That is when we spent a lot of time to develop it internally. It took us 3-4 months to decide on what we actually wanted to do, once we had that, it took 2 months for 2 developer to develop the whole system," he explains.

"We hardly spent a fraction of the cost to what we were getting it in the market for," he adds.
 

Cloud Strategy

It was 4 years ago that Decathlon migrated to cloud.

"The first step was to migrate our ERP to the cloud, and the final call was made in 2019 when we shifted our website and linked microservices on the cloud," Tiwary shares.
Commenting on becoming a 100% cloud company, Tiwary says, "95% of the data is on cloud. We use multiple cloud platforms. There are some tools that work better on physical server so those tools will always be on-premise but other than that everything is on cloud".
 

Future developments

Talking about what the future holds for Decathlon, Tiwary says,

"We are planning to use IoT inside the stores. Our stores are at least 17-1800 sq meters in size on an average. We are exploring cases around how can I use IoT inside the store location and maybe link it with the application. This application will not just be used for shopping but also to find the right products inside the stores," Tiwary adds.

Source - The Economic Times 

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