
Culture is the most important aspect of how you run a GCC: Tesco’s Sumit Mitra
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. BENGALURU : Tesco Plc, one of the UK’s largest retailers, was rocked by an accounting scandal and reported its worst annual loss in 2015. Its cash coffers were nearly empty, and there was a need to transform the business to get more cash.
Enter Sumit Mitra. The former BT Group managing director was brought in by the British retailer in 2017 to head Tesco Business Solutions, the technology centre arm. His sole mandate was to drive change.
Today, the company has one of its oldest running global capability centres (GCC) in India and employs about 5,500 people at its Whitefield office in Bengaluru. Dressed in a black Hugo Boss t-shirt, Mitra spoke to Mint over a video call on 20 March about Tesco’s in-house centre and the work his company looks after for the parent firm (Tesco Plc). Even as the retailer mulls giving over soon-to-expire food to shoppers in some of its stores, the back-end team stationed out of Bengaluru and its four other global business centres is the brains behind the management of each of its retail customer-facing stores.
Also Read: Nano giants: Niche tech firms fuel India’s next GCC wave Tesco runs four other GCCs worldwide, and each centre handles functions ranging from micro and macro management of retail outlets to handling customer invoices, hiring, and managing supplier contracts. The GCCs—in Budapest, Bengaluru, Scotland, and Ireland—employ up to 8,000 people, about 2.3% of its 338,000-strong workforce. Its India centre is its biggest, employing two-thirds of its entire GCC workforce.
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