SUBMITTED TO PROF.

GRISHMA PADHYE

FOUNDATION FOR LIBERAL AND MANAGEMENT EDUCATION | 2011-15

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2
2. VISION
2
3. MISSION
2
4. HUMAN RESOURSES
3
5. STRATEGY
3
6. STUCTURE
4
7. STORE ENVIRONMENT
5
8. STORE CULTURE & CORE VALUES
5
9. STORE TECHNOLOGY & DESIGN
6
10.
CONCLUSION
6
11.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
7

INTRODUCTION
K.Raheja Corp Group is known for its esteemed presence in the Retail
business. The group revolutionized the retail scenario in India by
launching Shopper's Stop in Andheri. The Group now operates number of
Retail stores throughout the country.
Hypercity, Crossword and Shopper's Stop are a part of K.Raheja Corp
Group. Hypercity was incepted in the year 2005 and it provides a truly
international shopping experience.
Hypermarkets typically have business models focusing on high-volume,
low-margin sales. It is a superstore combining a supermarket and a
department store. The result is an expansive retail facility carrying a wide
range of products under one roof, including full groceries lines and general
merchandise. They allow customers to satisfy all their routine shopping
needs in one trip.
In case of Hypercity the whole idea was to make shopping a unique
experience for the customers in terms of contemporary range of products,
modern & exciting environment and new techniques of retail pricing.
Today, Hypercity have marked its presence with 12 operational stores
across 9 cities such as Mumbai (Malad, Thane & Vashi), Pune, Amritsar,
Jaipur, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Ludhiana, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. It offers
over 44,000 products sourced both from local & global markets. The
product range consist of: foods, home ware, home entertainment, hi-tech
appliances, furniture, sports, toys & fashion. In addendum, it offers other
value added services like consumer finance, ATM facility, telecom
services, pharmacy, Bakery and Restaurants under one roof.

VISION
Hypercity's vision is to be an integral part of customer lives, by offering
them a high quality shopping experience through great products at ever

better process.

MISSION
Hypercity's business mission is to sustain profitable growth by
encouraging customers to discover an authoritative assortment of quality
products with exciting promotion in a globally competitive retail
environment and create through our company values an environment
where our associate grow within the business.

HUMAN RESOURSES
Human Resource team at Hypercity is knowledgeable, Approachable;
provide solutions, an equal Business Partner, Trustworthy, Available and
Dependable.
Hypercity's Human Resource vision is towards creating an engaged
workforce through people enabling processes and knowledge sharing
practices based upon the Hypercity value system.

STRATEGY
It is worthwhile looking at what the company considers to be its core
competencies and competitive advantages. Because of the presence of
the Raheja group in retail for a good amount of time prior to setting up
Hypercity, the company has certain competencies because of their
established supplier relations and advanced business support services.
They also have a very strong Visual Merchandizing team which is a great
asset given that they seek to create a visual experience for the customer.
Another area of strength for Hypercity is the emphasis given to Processes
and Procedures. Tight audits, low shrinkage levels, established procedures
to be followed, employee handbooks are some of the characteristics that
illustrate this strength.
All these give rise to a significant competitive advantage to the firm vis-vis their competitors. The quality of store layout and design, visual
treatment gives rise to a unique Customer Experience and this is one area
where Hypercity beats its opponents like Reliance Mart, Big Bazaar hands
down. The consequence of established supplier relations means that

Hypercity can comparatively provide a higher breadth of choice in brands

for the customer. The tight audits and emphasis given to wastage control
has led to Hypercity having the lowest shrinkage levels amongst the big
retailers and this has given them a significant edge in terms of bottom
line.
Apart from these high-level goals, the company also sets measurable
goals for itself that give direction to day-to-day activities. Some of its
operating goals are:
Employee Growth: The company lays great emphasis on organic growth
and prefers to promote its own employees to hiring fresh employees for
higher levels. It also has a strong training program where employees are
given regular trainings on new brands, their characteristics, how to
present them to customers etc.
Financial Goals: Similar to most big players in the retail industry, Hypercity
is currently running on losses but it aims to break even by 2014.
Individual stores are given targets to meet.
Growth: Hypercity seeks to grow its presence to Tier-2 cities so as to
increase revenues by tapping into the growing consumer demand in these
cities.

STRUCTURE
The organization structure can be classified into 2 levels, one at the
central level and other at store level.
At the Central level, sits functional teams like
Buying & Merchandizing: This team is involved in procuring items for all
the hypercity stores in the country. They take overall decisions on which
products/brands to buy and in how much quantity. This is to create
consistency across the board and ties into the overall customer
experience aspect that we described at the beginning of the strategy
section
Visual Merchandizing Team: This team is involved in the store layout,
design, displays, signage, software used in printing logos etc. A team
called Intactics consists of people experienced in its domain and is given a
lot of importance within the firm
HR Team: Manages resources, handles compensation and employee
benefits, administer mandatory compliance tests to incoming employees,
plays a lead role in promotions etc.

At the store level,

The General Manager is the overall head and is the face of the store as far
as the central team is concerned. He is given a free hand to use the
central budget allocated to him in the best possible manner to meet the
financial needs of his store
Below the general manager sits a huge operations team which virtually
makes up most of the store-site employee team size. At the bottom of the
operations pyramid are associates who handle day-to-day activities in
their respective departments - such as such as Food & Staples,
Perishables, Personal Care, Home and Linen, Furniture .The key work of
the associates is to sell the products in their department. Apart from
helping the customers in buying their products, his job profile entails
keeping a track of products sold and making sure , changing price tickers
(daily basis in case of food products). The team lead is responsible for all
the activities in his department.
There are around 168 associates in the Hypercity store that we visited. 3-4
associates work in a department and they report to 1 Team Lead who in
turn reports to 1 service manager for that department. There are 9 service
managers in total for the 9 departments in the store .The service
managers report to 1 of the 2 Store Operations Managers depending on
whether their department is classified as food/non-food. The 2 store
managers report to the deputy store operations manager who reports
directly to the store general manager who is the head of the store.

STORE ENVIRONMENT
The store wants to position itself in order to satisfy the consumer
demands of middle and upper middle customers. It considers the sales
processes and sale standards its core strengths. It does not focus
necessarily on offering the lowest possible prices but it wants to maintain
quality and standards. It wants to differentiate itself from other stores in
terms of customer point of view. It wants to provide an exclusive customer
experience in the big retail format. In order to improve the visual appeal
and aesthetics it has employed an INTACTICS team for store display. They
follow a fixed format for displays and sales.
The focus on the customer experience combines with a focus on costs.
Here the efforts are directed to reduce the 'shrinkage' or loss of inventory
to the store. The costing structure is reworked at the start of every
financial year. These include operating expenditure, compensation and
benefits, stationary costs and administrative costs.
They often send out their marketing teams to check the prices offered by

the other competitors. These teams purchase items from the competitor's
stores and compare the prices. They do the price checks for only essential
items, basic goods and necessities. The unorganized stores are often
unable to offer comparable prices as they don't have the advantage of
economies of scale and efficient supply chains. When compared to other
organized retail stores, Hypercity is able to achieve lowest shrinkage rates
and lowest losses. Reliance Megamart and Big Bazaar have more
shrinkage and incur more losses. They are given financial targets for every
month by the central teams. Hypercity has been able to achieve
profitability in the Bannerghatta Road unit, but as a company they have
been unable to make profits.
They take most of the macroeconomic conditions as given. This includes
local laws and regulations. They try and adapt their work flow and
processes as required by the rules and regulations and do not try to
change them. The relationships with the suppliers and support services
providers are determined by the central headquarters. The decision to sell
particular items and merchandise lays with the store manager and in this
manner a control over the relations with the suppliers. The store has not
been in operation for a period long enough to gauge the impact of the
economic slowdown. It has witnessed increased sales and has been able
to achieve profits much before the anticipated time of break even.

STORE CULTURE & CORE VALUES

Culture of Hypercity is Organic, supported by high level of participation by
employees in various processes. It is an Open culture but not entirely
informal. The organization holds regular activities outside work for better
relations between employees e.g. cricket matches, outings, etc. Such
extensive team building exercises are conducted round the year. Also,
there are meetings on every Saturday, for all teams, for discussing the
major achievements; goals for the next period; any kind of problems the
employees or management is facing and possible solutions for the same.
The Products offered at Hypercity ranges from Food and Grocery to
General Merchandise to Fashion.
The Speciality of Hypercity is that it offers a wide and contemporary range
of innovative products, sourced from both local and international markets.
It has got Exclusive imported food from Waitrose, UK, in - store
Restaurants, Home theatre Demo room, Demo Kitchen and other services
for the customers.

Hypercity is more than just aisles and shelves, it also boasts of some very
unique shopping experience, which sets them apart.

STORE TECHNOLOGY & DESIGN

The core work processes are all the operational activities that contribute
to selling more products. So the activity of actually selling the products to
the customers coupled with associated activities such as store ops, stock
keeping, Merchandising, Visual Merchandising (Advertising) etc. form the
Core processes.
Non-Core processes include activities such as HR, Training, Marketing,
Accounting etc.
In fact, the Hypercity employees contend that their strength lies in their
work processes and standards.
Looking at it from the point of view of Perrow's framework, the task variety
is quite low. The tasks that the associates perform are fairly repetitive. At
times, people do encounter ad-hoc situations that may require some
creativity but otherwise, the tasks are fairly standard.
As for task analysability, all the tasks can be broken down into different
steps. They have a written descriptive manual describing elaborately all
the steps in performing different tasks. The employees are required to go
through the manual during the training.

CONCLUSION
Hypercity is in an expansion mode with various opportunities in hand such
as E-retailing, urbanization and increasing disposable income which can
increase the sales of organization by multi folds.
But the structure and culture of organization will also get evolved as the
organization moves along the line of expansion. Also, Hypercity faces the
threats of inflation and lack of differentiation with new entrants. To combat
these, organization has to keep evolving its strategy along with the
changing market conditions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.hypercityindia.com/press/detail?id=10/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCity
http://www.livemint.com/Companies/BFLAlvT7ss5m4BhQqJnecM/HyperCity
-will-seek-to-dominate-existing-markets-new-CEO.html

http://www.slideshare.net/shashankscg/retail-hypercity-presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/AnjumPatel/hyper-city-gap-analysis
http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?
privcapid=26635779