Nordics shoe retailer looks Oracle retail merchandise financial planning to optimise financial planning processes across operations

Nordics shoe retailer looks Oracle retail merchandise financial planning to optimise financial planning processes across operations

Swedish shoe retailer Nilson Group has selected Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning to create an integrated planning practice and improve inventory management across its multiple retail brands in the Nordics.

The Oracle system will help Nilson Group introduce a common planning platform from which to quickly develop, consolidate, reconcile and approve financial plans for its DinSko, Nilson Shoes, Jerns, Skopunkten and Radical Sports brands.

Nilson Group expects to use the Oracle Retail application to create strategic high level and detailed low-level financial plans based on accurate forecasts to deliver a better understanding of customer demand in its 300 stores.

Building on existing Retail IT footprint

The implementation will also provide a consistent yet flexible approach to pre-season and in-season planning to better manage budgeting, open-to-buy and re-forecasting to help improve inventory performance and drive higher margins.

Following a competitive evaluation, Nilson Group identified Oracle Retail as the strongest proposition to replace its legacy planning systems, combining experienced local support and an established regional customer base, with proven best planning practice.

In addition, the retailer was keen to build on successful implementations of Oracle Business Intelligence as well as Oracle Database with Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle OLAP and Oracle Partitioning, and the selection of Oracle Retail was a good fit for its current IT environment.

Nilson Group invested in Oracle Retail in February 2011. The implementation is underway and is being led by Agnitum Information Technologies, a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

Torsten Balslev, Nilson Group chief information officer, said: “Our ability to be flexible in our planning practice and respond quickly to market changes and customer demand is crucial in ensuring that we can deliver the right products at the right time. Oracle Retail has a proven ability to help us achieve this goal and it is a further benefit that we can implement quickly and integrate easily with our existing IT infrastructure.”