Wipro re-purposes its retail portfolio to foster the OneOffice™ mindset

Retail is gradually becoming a tech business. Tech has become an enabler for accomplishing retailers’ business objectives, such as building a unified retail customer experience across digital and physical environments, supporting sustainability journeys, and driving more closely interconnected experiences with suppliers and partners.

Paradoxically, service providers are moving away from the tech lingo to drive retailers’ tech agendas and devising more retail-oriented, business-friendly, and unified offerings. The premise is to showcase capabilities retailers can comprehend and consume easily.

The OneOffice Mindset

HFS’ OneOffice describes how the onset of digital and emerging AI and automation solutions, coupled with the dire need to access meaningful data in real time, forces the back and middle offices to support the customer experience needs of the front. Consequently, we’re evolving to an era where only “OneOffice” matters anymore, creating the digital customer experience and an intelligent, single office to enable and support it.

In a recent HFS Highlight Report, Wipro adopted the OneOffice mindset with its new organizational structure, we discussed Wipro’s recent restructuring and how it was adopting an HFS OneOffice-like mindset while catering to its clients.

As a continuation and further drill down, this report sheds light on how Wipro’s Cloud and Infrastructure Services (CIS) service line redesigned retail offerings adhere to the same OneOffice mindset.

Wipro’s CIS offerings for retail now manifest a unified retail commerce vision

Wipro’s CIS service line has categorized all its retail offerings under the four connected buckets in Exhibit 1: Intelligent Store, Intelligent Supply Chain, Intelligent Foundation, and Intelligent Experience.

Exhibit 1: Wipro CIS retail portfolio aligns business objectives with offerings

Source: Wipro, 2023

There are a few notable aspects of the portfolio redesign exercise:

• The underlying business objectives (why) precede offerings (what): Each of the four buckets first mentions the business problems it solves and then the associated solutions and capabilities.
• Simplicity runs across the portfolio: The entire portfolio comprises a simple naming scheme and clearly defined business objectives and solutions. For example, Intelligent Store, as the name suggests, includes the in-store shopper- and operations-related retailer objectives and suggests offerings that can cumulatively make the store “intelligent.”
• The unification narrative is well-articulated: To become a truly autonomous and connected enterprise, a retailer needs to be working on all four primary categories encompassing store operations and customer engagements, supply chain modernization, a resilient and adaptable backend, and rendering a high-grade 360-degree experience (employees, partners, clients) by harnessing the power of data.
• Sustainability should be integrated and not isolated: A piecemeal approach that assigns sustainability goals to a part of the business won’t yield significant results. Wipro’s sustainability vision is clear: Retailers must evaluate their store and cloud footprint, entire supply chain, and operations while making sustainability-related decisions.

The Bottom Line: Wipro has its work cut out: make the on-paper vision into an on-ground reality.

Wipro has accomplished two goals. First, it identified an integrated and industry-specific solutions portfolio. Second, it reorganized internally to support and complement these offerings and the unified retail vision. However, multiple internal and external challenges remain. For example, regarding the Intelligent Store offerings, the present economic slowdown makes it difficult for retailers to invest in physical stores; in-store tech investments tend to scale linearly, and ROI is difficult to estimate. Besides, a reorganization exercise doesn’t always translate into new ways of working or changes in performance tracking metrics. Nevertheless, we appreciate Wipro’s new go-to-market strategy, and the retail portfolio redesign is the right first step to achieving the unified retail vision.