ABG's apparel and retail business launches training centre for retail excellence

The $40 billion Aditya Birla Group 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), which is India’s largest lifestyle retailer, with more than 1,000 exclusive branded outlets and over 1 million square feet of retail space across the country. Pantaloons Fashion &; Lifestyle, the Group''s newly-acquired business, also brings with it 71 exclusive stores.

The Group-owned Aditya Birla Retail operates More — a brand of food and grocery stores with 513 supermarkets and 15 hypermarkets.

With the fast growing retail sector increasingly facing a talent shortage, the Aditya Birla Group''s Apparel and Retail business has launched a first-of-its-kind initiative - Aditya Birla Centre of Retail Excellence (ABCRE) - in Kormangala, Bangalore. to train new recruits and existing staff.

The flagship training centre at Bangalore measures 3,940 sq ft of space, includes three training rooms, supported with three break-out rooms and has 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,” Mr. Barua added.

The three retail companies of Aditya Birla Group - Aditya Birla Retail, Madura Fashion &; Lifestyle and Pantaloon Fashion &; Retail Limited - have a 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).

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. The 18 cities comprise Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai, Vizag, Ernakulam/Cochin, Mysore, Kolkata, Nashik, Indore, Thane, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Trivandrum, Chandigarh and Lucknow. Through the centres in these 18 cities, ABCRE plans to meet the front-end training requirements of 25,000 retail employees by March 2014.

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 are soon to open in Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai over the next two months.