Morrisons partners with Wipro for systems transformation

27 January 2009

Morrisons, the UK food retailer, with 375 stores and annual turnover of £13 billion has chosen Wipro Retail, a specialist division of Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Wipro Limited, as its IT partner, to deliver a new and robust operating model that supports the retailer's strategic and commercial objectives.

Richard Pennycook, Morrisons' CFO, commented, ''Morrisons is making a major investment to give us the systems and processes to drive our business forward. Wipro Retail brings technology and retail business expertise to help us in this process.''

Wipro will support Morrisons to achieve the core objective of delivering effective planning, management and delivery of large scale systems and process change based on an Oracle ERP platform.

Gary Barr, CIO, Morrisons, said, ''This is more than a systems replacement programme. It is a business change programme enabled by the replacement of the existing IT systems, in order to support the continued and future growth of the business.''

Wipro Retail was chosen after extensive market testing and Morrisons' positive experience of working with them as part of the programme planning and scoping phase. As Phil Goodwin, programme director, Morrisons, explained, ''When we looked at the Oracle Implementation references, they all said that we should be speaking to Wipro Retail. We decided to shortlist Wipro Retail based on such strong feedback. During planning & scoping we allocated project streams to different potential partners; Wipro Retail impressed us most with their agility, quality of people and their cultural fit. We are confident that they have the capability to meet the future needs of Morrisons.''

In planning and scoping, Wipro Retail led work streams around manufacturing, testing and business intelligence / data warehousing. Wipro was also able to offer the right combination of on-shore, near shore and off-shore resources to deliver cost effectively for Morrisons.