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French, Italian and Russian successes showcased, while new process integration for merchandising finance control is unveiled  

French, Italian and Russian successes showcased, while new process integration for merchandising finance control is unveiled

 

At the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Annual Retail Federation & Expo in New York, Oracle has made a number of customer and product announcements to support momentum and drive growth within its retail business.

 

The vendor said French department store Galeries Lafayette had completed its roll out of the Oracle Retail platform to all Stores to support growth, optimising core retail functionality at its department stores to deliver business-wide benefits.

 

Applications including Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management, Oracle Retail Merchandising System, Oracle Retail Price Management, Oracle Retail Invoice Matching, Oracle Retail Sales Audit and Oracle Retail Allocation have replaced the previous legacy IT system, enabling Galeries Lafayette to create a single, scalable and integrated IT platform and a common set of retail processes for its stores.

 

“The strong partnership with Oracle was a crucial factor to the success of this project, as was board-level engagement and support,” said Laurent Singer, Galeries Lafayette chief information officer (CIO). “The Oracle Retail platform shall provide our business with the capabilities to manage our business more effectively, and enhance our retail functionality to drive our business forward.”

 

Planning is key for Gruppo Coin

 

Italian fashion and department store group, Gruppo Coin has also selected Oracle Retail’s fashion planning solutions to support its growth strategy as it seeks to enhance product lifecycle management and assortment strategies with the Oracle Retail Fashion Planning Suite.

 

With a growing need to support this expansion and adopt a more ‘fast fashion’ business model, Gruppo Coin wanted to more effectively analyse customer behaviour and create more localised assortment planning, perform attribute-based store clustering and execute strategies to more closely match supply to demand.

 

“Our growth is focused around expanding our business domestically and abroad, about diversifying out formats and developing the franchise business. We expect the Oracle Retail platform to support this expansion through improved management across the business of our planning and assortment processes,” said Bruno Cocchi, Gruppo Coin CIO.

 

Esselunga targets margins, customer service

 

Italian grocery retailer Esselunga has also sharpened its pricing strategy with Oracle Retail Planning Platform, aligning pricing with its best-value pricing strategy to deliver margin improvements and customer benefits.

 

With visibility to competitor pricing figures, Esselunga can now recalculate Index pricing, simulate the effect of any changes and identify the optimal price for key items prior to executing the strategy. Prior to implementing the Oracle Retail solution, this entire process used to take several weeks and Esselunga has succeeded in reducing time to market by more than 50%.

 

William O’Brien, Oracle Retail vice president in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) commented: “Oracle Retail is providing Esselunga with insight into consumer demand and has enabled pricing levels that its customers identify as a great value proposition.”

 

Detsky Mir supports strategic growth

 

Russia’s largest children’s retailer, Detsky Mir has gone live with Oracle Retail Release 13 to create a core retail platform that supports its strategic growth plans for long-term expansion.

 

Detsky Mir is using Oracle Retail applications to create a consolidated view of inventory. This is helping to improve product lifecycle management, to drive more accurate pricing strategies and support enhancements to the processes around placement, tracking and execution of orders.

 

“Oracle Retail is a key element in building an efficient retail business model and is a powerful resource in providing long-term competitive advantage,” explained Maxim Entyakov, head of Detsky Mir Group.

 

“We expect it, for example, to help us reduce delivery times by at least 10 percent, improve availability of goods by 15 to 20% and improve performance per square metre of floor space by 10 to 20%,” he continued. “Without the visibility provided by the Oracle Retail system, it would be impossible to further implement our development programme introducing standard regulations to performance and operations across our store network and manage these around the complexities of several time zones."

 

Also at NRF, Oracle has introduced the Oracle Financial Operations Control Integration Pack for the Oracle Retail Merchandising Suite and Oracle E-Business Suite Financials, which is designed to help retailers more effectively control key merchandising financial operations, including providing enhanced inventory valuation, more timely revenue recognition and streamlined merchandising procure to pay.