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An unstable macroeconomic environment is compelling retail CEOs to seek cost-effective operational strategies.
Many companies are realizing the benefits of the right-shoring model and establishing GCCs.
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Global capacity centers (GCCs) support organizations in navigating transformation, sculpting niche prospects, and driving the vision.
GCCs can play a more significant role than in the past due to their structure, functionality, and economic sustainability. 2020 reinforced these factors, resulting in a theory committed to providing increased business benefits to the parent company.
Global In-House Centers (GICs) are more than internal IT or operational storage facilities. They have moved beyond cost hedging to grow into GCCs and become a major institutional vision and strategy component.
GCCs drive operations and efficiency improvements for companies, create new technologies, resulting in cross-functional efforts, and launch new products and service providers to the market based on innovations generated at such centers.
Enterprise Thinking at GCCs
Traditionally, GCCs mirror their parent organizations, including their silos, often housing operations and technology teams together, sometimes under common leadership.
GCCs recognize the need for more involvement with the ecosystem to introduce new ideas, establish a stronger brand, or create more relevant goods for growing markets.
Retail companies are beginning to connect with the startup community and universities via different channels, such as accelerators, incubators, and hackathons, or are formulating a strategy.
Overview of Retail GCCs in India
The below infographic is a picture of the retail GCC in India.
India is the most preferred hub for GCCs, with half of the world’s GCC based there. 70% belong to US-headquartered companies and 20% from Europe, and 10% from the Asia Pacific region.
As of 2023, 1,500 GCCs employed 1.3 million highly skilled professionals with revenue generation of USD 36 Bn. By 2026, this is expected to increase to 2,000 GCCs employing 2 million people, generating a revenue of USD 60 Bn.
50%+ of the GCCs have been set up in the past seven years, and over 70% are in Bengaluru. These enterprises include big names such as Adidas, Domino’s, Amazon, Ikea, Tesco, Target, Walmart, Pepsico, Kellogg, Metro, Nestle, Mondelez, and Supervalu.
India has an exhaustive ecosystem with various incubation centers to incubate, help network, and fund bright and viable ideas. Organizations like Niti Ayog, Atal Innovation Mission, and others are playing a significant role in making the country an innovative startup destination.
Many other measures like these have contributed substantially toward making India one of the most sought-after startups and GCC destinations.
Among the 4 million IT professionals, nearly one-fourth work in GCCs.
In the future, 80% of global retail/consumer-packed goods (CPG) companies will establish GCCs in India.
Over 50% of India’s GCCs invest in emerging technologies like analytics, cloud, RPA, AI, and ML. They will need to bridge the skill demand-supply gap and continue to focus on reskilling/upskilling to grow further.
Focus on GCCs Initiatives in India
Draup analyzed the talent scenario of established and emerging GCC locations in India. The report bifurcates GCCs into five zones according to office expansion and years of setting up.
85% of retail GCCs are in very well-matured zones 3, 4, and 5, and the remaining 15% of retail GCCs are in their early stage. It is predicted to increase in the upcoming years.
57% of Retail GCCs in India are located in Bengaluru, compared to 75% in the NCR.
GCC retailers are experimenting with digital technologies to increase customer happiness. ERP, cloud, big data and analytics, cybersecurity, enterprise mobility, and digital transformation are key priority areas with the biggest talent demand.
Retail GCCs are employing strategic partnerships/acquisitions and leveraging the robust support ecosystem as their feeder talent to accelerate their initiatives.
For example,
- Amazon acquired Perpule, a company offering cloud-based PoS for offline stores in India to improve inventory, checkout, and customer experience.
- Walmart partnered with IIT Madras to research technologies, work on digital advancements, and enhance the education ecosystem in India.
The report also bifurcates locations into the Center of Excellence (CoE), Hubs, Satellites, and Outposts buckets as per their talent scalability and maturity.
While it is no surprise that Bengaluru is clubbed under CoE, Hyderabad has the potential to emerge as a retail technology hub. There are tier-2 locations like Kolkata, Coimbatore, Indore, Chandigarh, and Jaipur that GCC can leverage for small initiatives at low cost.
The report further details the GCC trends, retail globalization trends, key GCC locations, and factors of setting up initiatives in various Indian locations.
Draup for Talent enables workforce planning teams to track multiple locations efficiently in real time. Its Location Intelligence provides talent insights across hotspots in ANZ, APAC, North America, LATAM, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe.
Workforce planning teams can use insights into talent size, cost, ecosystem maturity, etc. They can extract data and adopt a policy to acquire a diverse global workforce.
