Oracle Retail Solutions

For retailers, emerging technologies, globalization and changing economic and demographic trends are exerting pressure from all sides. Accenture’s studies of high-performance retailers have uncovered three key characteristics shared by all: effective use of customer insight, a relentless growth agenda and simple and agile operating models. At the same time, Oracle has identified a fundamental disconnect between the planning and execution sides of many retail businesses. When the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, it’s hard to create anything that works well.

Working with Oracle, Accenture is helping retailers leverage technology to chart a course to high performance. With Accenture’s experience and Oracle’s retail solutions, clients are finding options for growing and thriving in a climate marked by struggle.

When it comes to implementing solutions for the retail industry—from incremental improvements to enterprise transformation—Accenture has the necessary knowledge and experience. The knowledge comes both firsthand and through industry research. As for experience, Accenture has worked with more than 85 percent of the retailers implementing Oracle Retail Solutions. Accenture’s track record includes global projects that focus on business strategy, process, large-scale IT implementation, outsourcing and human performance. The company works with 350 of the Fortune 500 retailers and countless others that are on their way to becoming global leaders.

Much of Accenture’s knowledge of Oracle’s retail solutions comes from the collaborative relationship between the two companies. Whether we are working on research and development or combining efforts to transform a company’s operations, the strong relationship and mutual knowledge delivers tangible benefits for clients.

Enhancing this collaboration are Accenture’s industry research and its network of more than 50 integrated delivery centers. These centers—which house more than 1000 professionals dedicated specifically to Oracle Retail—offer an environment in which experience blends with new ideas, resulting in innovative applications and processes that help boost the performance of retailers.

Retailers working with Accenture have seen benefits throughout their operations including:

• A reduction in markdowns by up to 25 percent.
• Increases in inventory turns by up to 20 percent.
• A reduction in inventory by as much as 25 percent.
• Increases in gross margins by five to 10 percent.

At the center of Oracle’s retail solutions is customer insight. Infusing customer insight into four key areas—planning, merchandise management, supply chain and stores—means transforming from a set of disparate functions to a complete, open and integrated platform capable of scaling and supporting the business strategies that enable competitive advantage.

• Planning: Oracle Retail Merchandise Planning Solutions use sophisticated mathematical models and optimization routines to create intelligent estimates of future business opportunities, providing a common demand-planning engine that infuses a retailer’s operation with customer insight. Oracle Retail Planning Solutions cover critical planning processes including merchandise financial planning, category and assortment management, inventory planning, demand forecasting, item planning and space optimization.
  
  
• Merchandising: Oracle Retail Merchandise Operations Management is a scalable, fully integrated but independent group of products that enable retailers to coordinate merchandise operations and maintain a single, comprehensive source of consistent and accurate data across business functions and channels. With these applications, retailers can coordinate product development and sourcing, perform day-to-day merchandising activities, audit point-of-sales data, perform invoice matching, make informed pricing decisions and manage the import process—all on a single platform that is integrated with upstream and downstream business processes.
  
  
• Supply Chain: Oracle Retail Supply Chain Planning and Execution Solutions deliver replenishment planning, replenishment optimization and collaborative inventory management capabilities to retailers—accurately matching supply with demand to deliver on customer expectations while simultaneously maximizing inventory productivity. By uniting demand-planning functions with execution systems, Oracle enables retailers to make inventory movement decisions that are informed by customer insight.
  
  
• Stores: Oracle Retail Point-of-Service provides the flexibility, responsiveness and scalability to meet even the largest retailer’s point-of-sale requirements, leading to improved customer service and higher sales. In addition, Oracle Retail Point-of-Service offers next-generation features that improve customer service and reduce costs, including the ability to process returns for items purchased on the Web, access retail Web sites, fulfill Web-generated orders and look up cross-store inventory.
  
  

Beyond the four critical areas above, retailers often need assistance integrating corporate functions such as marketing, human resources, finance, infrastructure and administration into the overall operation as well. Oracle Retail Solutions integrate these functions so that all aspects of a retailer—from planning through execution to ongoing operations—are working together to improve the customer experience and drive profitable growth.

Contact us to find out how Accenture can help you achieve high performance with Oracle Retail Solutions.