After a competitive pitch, Tesco has engaged Jam Warehouse, a South African IT company, to build an automated New Product Development system.
The system is intended to reduce the administration around project tracking and approvals, and generate process performance metrics to drive continuous improvement. It will embed Tesco’s internal best practice, and support cost reductions through process efficiencies and re-use of design materials.
Rollout will be progressive, based on pilot performance and internal demand: ultimately several thousands of projects could be managed through it every year.
New Product Development is increasingly important to retailers, with innovation in own-label products being driving both margins and brand positioning. Traditionally, marketing staff have managed this work through spreadsheets and paper-based tracking systems. As the volume and pace of innovation picks up, computerisation of the process offers the possibility of major benefits in reducing cost, rework and time to market. The Tesco system will also handle the workflow around packaging design and specification.
Jam Warehouse is a small, innovative software company based in Cape Town. It specialises in applications for Marketing and Business Process Management. It entered the offshore development arena two years ago and has already implemented a major brand management system at Tesco, and also built the core reprographics and production workflow system for Kestrel, one of the UK’s biggest reprographics houses.
Its Open Source document management system, originally built for the South African Medical Research Council, is currently being taken up at the rate of 600 copies per month by organisations in sectors including professional services, government, manufacturing, biotechnology and aerospace.
Tesco operates 2,291 stores around the world and employs almost 300,000 people. It has grown from a UK domestic retailer to an International Group, through an organic growth programme. It has four core businesses: the core UK business, non-food, retailing services and international.
