Marks & Spenser to focus on tech led growth with TCS partnership

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced that it has extended its partnership with Marks and Spencer plc (M&S), to transform the latter’s core technology stack, improve resilience and pace of innovation, and drive sustainable growth. 

TCS has been a strategic partner to M&S for over a decade, helping the retailer drive numerous business-critical transformation programmes, including its journey to become a digital-first enterprise. “In the next phase of this partnership, TCS will simplify M&S’ technology landscape and modernise its core business systems with a cloud-first and composable platform strategy. Leveraging its engineering talent and practices, TCS will help drive a culture of futuristic thinking and continuous innovation,” says the company statement.

The modernisation program will help M&S reduce technical debt, improve time to market and enhance scalability. Additionally, the transformation into a simple, agile, data-led business will accelerate M&S’ strategic priorities of delivering superior customer experience, driving online growth, leading in omnichannel and sustainability, modernising its supply chain, and expanding its global reach, informs the company. 

“As we move into the next phase of our transformation to reshape M&S for growth and value creation, we are delighted to extend our partnership with TCS. Together, we pivoted M&S to a digital-first business and achieved key business outcomes such as growing dotcom, driving loyalty through Sparks and realising significant cost and productivity efficiencies. Their industry advisory capabilities will help us accelerate the pace of business transformation by improving time to market; increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of M&S’ operating model; reducing technical debt; and infusing innovation for growth and value creation. This will enable us to achieve our goals of significantly increasing our active app userbase; further growing online sales volume; and building an efficient, resilient supply chain network,” Katie Bickerstaffe, Co-Chief Executive Officer, M&S PLC.

“This transformation to a simple, fast, brilliant engineering-led value delivery model is essential for our business. TCS is the partner of choice given their deep contextual knowledge, best-in-class engineering talent and deep innovation capability,” said Jeremy Pee, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, M&S PLC.

“As the long-standing transformation partner of M&S, we are fully vested in their purpose and belief that a simplified organisation with a culture of customer centricity and continuous innovation will help them drive sustainable growth in market share, sales, and profit. We are truly delighted to continue and enhance our relationship with them. Our priority is to modernise key enablers and build a high-performance culture that can unlock growth by harnessing the power of their global brand,” Shankar Narayanan, President, Retail Cluster, TCS, said.