Plan to cover 18 cities by March 2014
The training centre for retail excellence, a first-of-its-kind initiative started by ABG’s Apparel and Retail business at Koramangala in Bangalore to train new recruits and the existing staff, has just started functioning. Known as the Aditya Birla Centre of Retail Excellence (ABCRE), the trainng centre admeasuring 3,940 sq.ft. of space includes three training rooms, supported with three break-out rooms and has also a 20-pax dining room. The centre can turn around 75 trainees at a time.
“The Indian retail sector is facing an acute shortage of ‘employable’ talent, even as there is a growing focus on service standards in the industry,” said Mr. Pranab Barua, Business Director, Apparel & Retail Business, Aditya Birla Group. “ABCRE hopes to fill this gap by training new recruits and upgrading the skill levels of the existing staff”.
The $40 billion Aditya Birla Group (ABG) has a strong presence in the Indian retail market through its fashion and lifestyle, and food and grocery businesses. The group owns Madura Fashion & Lifestyle (MF&L), India’s largest lifestyle retailer, with more than 1,000 exclusive branded outlets and over one million sq.ft. of retail space across the country. Pantaloons Fashion & Lifestyle, the group’s newly-acquired business, has 71 exclusive stores.
The group-owned Aditya Birla Retail operates More, a brand of food and grocery stores with 513 supermarkets and 15 hypermarkets.
Meanwhile, plans are underway to open training centres in 18 major cities of India, covering 90 per cent of the retail network of the group – Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai, Vizag, Ernakulam/Cochin, Mysore, Kolkata, Nashik, Indore, Thane, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Trivandrum, Chandigarh and Lucknow. Through the centres, ABCRE plans to meet the front-end training requirements of 25,000 retail employees by March 2014.
The three retail companies of the Aditya Birla Group – Aditya Birla Retail, Madura Fashion & Lifestyle and Pantaloon Fashion & Retail Ltd. – have their presence across 150 cities in India. The ABCRE training centres will facilitate the front-end training needs of these three businesses. The centres will be manned by Learning Delivery Specialists (LDS).
The Aditya Birla Centre of Retail Excellence will integrate the learning spaces across web-based, instructor-led and store-based trainings. Every retail employee will have a unique learning ID, which will track the learners’ training lifecycle. The electronic ‘Tab’-based learning management system will provide accurate metrics on training ROI and effectiveness.
ABCRE thus plans to meet the current and future manpower requirements of the group’s retail operations. Four more centres, one each in Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai, will be opened in the next two months.