PROFILE
B
rent Curry is an experienced IT leader
who has sat on The Foschini Group
Board since 2015. Initially joining
the company as an industrial engineer,
Curry started by putting in a paperless
ticketing system in place in the warehousing
operation before progressing to the logistics
department and then IT.
The company has slowly migrated a lot of
the divisions and Curry now sits on the main
board of all the Group’s territories – South
Africa, Australia and the UK.
Overseeing a portfolio that covers IT,
logistics, e-commerce and group marketing,
Curry plays a key part in the company’s
Digital Transformation strategy in an
industry that is changing all the time. other stores. We’ve also got digitised gift
cards. When 16 to 25-year-olds come into
our store, they want to shop differently, so
we’ve got to address those needs and react
to it.
The Foschini Group currently employs 25,000
people and comprises of 25 retail brands,
including American Swiss, Next, Phase Eight,
Sportscene and Totalsports. Can you explain a recent solution
that you helped implement and how
successful has it been?
The company also has a big financial
services division and sells all insurance
products, as well as making clothing. A lot
of its work is based on technological trends,
with customer service labs used to showcase
the technology. Curry has been driving the
digital side of the business for many years,
including its e-commerce strategy and
extending it into the mytfgworld brand.
How do you envisage the industry
looking like in the next few years?
We’ve taken a view of what we think the
retail future would look like in 2025 and have
created concept videos of what we think
our stores would look like. We’ve launched
a mobile training app for our staff because
data is very expensive in South Africa. It can
look at training and how to serve a customer
and how to operate different technologies
through a training app.
We’re putting all the data together to have
better data signs and opportunities with
the customer and our planning systems
I BELIEVE THE CIO ROLE IS MORE OF A
STRATEGIC ADVISOR TO THE CEO.
are upgrading with Artificial Intelligence
and Machine Learning, as well as putting
customer counters into store with conversion
rates, rolling wi-fi to all our stores, having
the right stock in the store, looking at the
profile of the store and what customers are
buying. We’re putting new planning systems
in which use AI around forecasting customer
behaviour. Customers can scan the product
and see the availability in the store and
www.intelligentcio.com
We launched our e-com in late 2014 and
put in a strategy together. We then went to
marketplace to look at what platform we
could use if we wanted to use the e-com
button more in the future. And the Oracle
AVG offered that. One key thing that we
wanted to differentiate was to have one
check out, so if you go to any of our brands,
you can shop across all of them and do one
check out.
The second one was that we could link it
to our Private Label card. Half of our sales
are done through our credit offering and a
lot of those customers don’t have a credit
card. We could therefore introduce them to
shopping online and the Oracle platform
offered us that. We’ve had no issues using it
and it’s all primarily outsourced and hosted
on a cloud base. It was a product where we
could get resources from around the world
to support, with its functionality meeting
our long-term strategy.
Last year in South Africa was the real Black
Friday for retailers. We doubled what we
thought we would do and this year we had
a 24% growth on last year, again way
above our expectations and out-performing
a lot of our competitors. It was one of the
best in the industry.
What advice would you give to
aspiring CIOs?
The job of the CIO has changed
dramatically. I’m very fortunate that I sit
on the board and our group realises that IT
is critical, and it deserves to have a board
position. A lot of CIOs report to the CFO,
whose objective is to control costs or cut
them and sometimes you’ve to got to invest
money to make money. My role is more of
an advisory one to the CEO. Our previous
one took me to a lot of visits oversees
when we were doing any due diligence on
businesses, so I was party to all of those. I
believe the CIO role is more of a strategic
INTELLIGENTCIO
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