UAE’s E-City first to go live with SAP Retail

The recently-opened E-City in UAE’s Wafi Mall has become the first retailer in the region to use SAP’s Retail platform in conjuction with SAP PoS (Point-of-sale).

Saji Oommen, general manager for group information technology at the Al Batha Group which owns the E-City outlet, claims that the implementation is also the first to use the PoS application. The integration was partly aided by SAP – which is not surprising, considering the German’s firm decade-long history with the UAE-based company.

“It was pretty interesting project because it was something we had not done before. Around three months was the duration of the project. We started in September 2008. The project was over by the end of December,” he elaborates. .

“It made a lot of sense for us to go with SAP because of the in-house expertise we have on SAP, and our familiarity with SAP applications. This application we are talking about is one of the leading PoS applications in the world, created by another company called Triversity. With the retail initiative that we had over there [in E-City], we were planning to open a lot of stores with very different types of formats, stores and requirements. We wanted to have something which is scalable,” he continues.

Oommen did not pinpoint when future stores would have the system, but expressed confidence that the next one would not be far on the horizon: “It’s coming up. The second one is already identified and we’ll start working immediately on it.”

Al Batha Group operates more than 20 groups within its portfolio in a variety of sectors including retail and FMCG. The firm previously won an ACN award for its mobile CRM implementation in 2007, and CIO Saji Oommen was a finalist for CIO of the Year in 2008.

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