OREANDA-NEWS. February 07, 2011. "Lenta" is prospective growth-dedicated company. Effective development of business and fast response to changes in the retail sphere requires modern IT-decisions abreast with the company's enlargement.

"Today, management of all business processes in "Lenta" retail network is realized on centralized basis and is supported by modern hi-tech systems. However, technologies are constantly improving, so for maintenance of the required business growth rates we have launched a number of strategic initiatives in the field of IT, the first step being the implementation of the simple and effective system of electronic approval of commercial contracts" - says Vsevolod Kuzmich, Lenta’s IT-director.

The decision to introduce the system of electronic approval of contracts in the company was made at the end of the last year, because the existing manual process of work with contracts demands coordination between many employees representing various departments, and involves certain time costs.

The project envisages automation of internal process of approval and signing of contracts with suppliers, as well as appendices to such contracts – agreements for marketing, logistics services, agreements on factoring and change of the contractual parties.

The system will be implemented by Dev-House Company (member of State Corporation Dev-House) on the basis of free software, and will feature a converged platform based on BPM* -engine Intalio and ECM* -system Alfresco. Such combination of platforms will allow to achieve high flexibility and transparency of business processes, increasing the company's manageability. Besides, the work with great volumes of documents will become significantly faster, so losses and technical errors will be eliminated during documents arrangement, and contract approval process will be sped up. And the use of open technologies will provide for essential reduction of the system’s cost, if compared to similar proprietary systems, due to no need to pay royalties.

"Introduction of electronic document circulation system in "Lenta", based on free software – Alfresco and Intalio platforms - is the first project of such enormous scale in retail business", - states Konstantin Kulichenko, General Director of Dev-House Company. "Lenta" was the first in the branch to appreciate the advantages of free technologies, as well as the efficiency and economy they provide".

As it has been planned, the system’s development will be completed in March 2011, and it will be launched late in April 2011. Subsequently, the software will be integrated with SAP ERP-system that is currently functioning in "Lenta".

It should be noted that "Lenta" has sufficient experience of introduction of advanced information decisions to the branch. Thus, in 2004 the company was one of the first retail trade networks in Russia, to introduce SAP system for retail, which allowed to optimize business processes and to ensure higher business transparency. In 2005 "Lenta" was the first company in Russia to introduce the trade space control system Space Planning by JDA and Floor Planning by JDA, and managed to integrate this product with its SAP system. As of today, the company has a highly effective IT-infrastructure and maintains close partnership relations with IBM, Oracle, CISCO, HP, SAP and Microsoft, as well as the leading developers of special solutions for retail trade.

* BPM – business process management

**ECM – enterprise content management