Tesco Hindustan Service Centre (HSC), the Bangalore-based captive unit of the world?s third largest retailer, Tesco, will extend its operational model for remote infrastructure management and financial accounting to Europe and Asia. The entire work will be managed in India.
The Bangalore unit manages financial accounting, payrolls and pension processing of Tesco?s 2,60,000 employees. It is also responsible for online marketing & analysis for e-commerce, architectural services and internal helpdesk for stores. Tesco is based in the UK and has revenues of ?30.4 billion.
Currently, Tesco HSC largely caters to English speaking countries like the UK, Ireland and the US. Sandeep Dhar, CEO, Tesco HSC, said, ?We will extend the operational model to countries like Hungary? Poland? the Czech Republic? Slovakia? Turkey? Thailand? South Korea? Malaysia? China and Japan. This would largely be for remote infrastructure management and financial accounting.?
Tesco will also increase its headcount by 25-30% this financial year to cater to the increasing demand. ?As of now, we have about 3,600 employees in India. We have already added around 600 employees and will hire another 300 by the end of this financial year,? Dhar said.
At the start of 2009, Mike McNamara, director (operations & information technology) Tesco Global, had said that by outsourcing key IT projects to its Bangalore centre and other Indian vendors, Tesco has been able to bring down the time required to go live in new markets, such as the US, by up to six months. The company has also reduced deployment and main
tenance costs of IT applications by up to 70%. The firm is learnt to be making annual savings of around $45-60 million by outsourcing work to India.
After the Satyam scam, Tesco had cancelled contracts given to the firm and distributed them to other Indian IT vendors.
?Satyam was not a major vendor for us. Tesco HSC primarily does work from India. External vendors are given certain contracts when we have immediate and short-term requirements in areas like applications development,? Dhar added.
