Primark adds five more years to IT outsourcing contract with TCS

Fashion retailer Primark has agreed a five-year extension to its contract with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) as the retailer embarks on expansion plans, driven in part by IT.

TCS was first contracted by Primark in 2016, with the latest deal set to extend the relationship until at least 2029. The agreement covers 17 countries in Europe and the US.

A goal of the latest agreement will see TCS bring intelligent automation and DevOps capabilities to Primark, and provide a real-time view of technology and business systems, as well as processes, to support application development, testing and maintenance processes. 

Primark CIO Andrew Brothers said the deal with TCS supports the company’s growth plans. “We’re expanding our partnership with TCS to build a robust, resilient and reliable IT operating environment to become a more efficient, technology-led global organisation with the agility to quickly adapt to changing demands and requirements in a fast-paced industry,” he said.

Brothers said TCS will provide the operational stability and accountability needed to support the scaling of the business. “This will allow us to respond to market trends and customer preferences in a timely manner, ensuring that we continue to deliver quality products at the best value for our customers,” he added.

The fashion retailer has more than 80,000 staff across 440 stores globally and continues to expand. 

TCS has a number of UK customers in the retail sector, including Sainsbury’s, Kingfisher, Marks & Spencer and the Co-operative Group (Co-op).

The Indian IT services giant’s head of retail, Shekar Krishnan, said businesses such as Primark are increasingly reliant on the latest technologies to keep pace with changes in the retail sector. “The fashion industry is continually modernising its entire value chain – from conceptualisation, to design, to production and retailing – with innovation-led initiatives to achieve environmental, social and governance goals.”

In February, the Co-op announced it was working with TCS to adopt a cloud-first model as part of a plan to reduce its carbon footprint, with the migration of IT to the cloud.

It said the project would also provide a platform for future growth. TCS is managing the migration from datacentre to the public cloud, as well as its hybrid cloud and software-as-a-service infrastructure. The Co-op, which has worked with TCS for over 14 years, is using the IT services firm’s Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Longer partnerships appear more common in the sector today, with cyclical changes in supplier to drive down costs deemed less important than having a supplier that understands the business.

In a recent interview with Computer Weekly, TCS’s UK head, Amit Kapur, explained that understanding the “customer context” is as important for an IT services company as knowing the latest digital technologies. “A contextual understanding of a customer is gold,” he said.

This deep understanding of an organisation’s IT needs is built up over years of work by service providers across all technologies with customers. There’s currently an increase in long-term outsourcing deals and more partnerships between IT services companies and their customers, said Kapur.