Rising customer demands push retailers to adopt futuristic technologies so that retail employees can successfully cope up with the changing retail landscape. With the explosion of social media, Omnichannel shopping, and the pressure to expand into new formats and countries, it has become critically important for retailers to provide flexible and reliable solutions to their customers and to find innovative ways to increase satisfaction with the services provided. But in reality, regardless of the technologies and expenditures, it’s crucial for retailers to continually re-evaluate and monitor the health of different Oracle systems in terms of sales, upsell/cross-sell, inventory management, system performance, and other salient attributes. It is very important to have a sophisticated system in place to run your business. By doing this, you

  • Figure out priorities
  • Improve strategies
  • Recognize business opportunities and
  • Achieve effective store management

Major Industry Challenges:

The consequences of using antiquated business applications and systems can be multi-faceted and ultimately damaging to a company’s bottom line. Take a look at the roadblocks that can arise due to an inefficient system that isn’t optimized. 

  • Application performance is one of the most common problems that retailers face where the scope of severity is high.
  • Data loss during system failures poses a major threat. 
  • Retailers often encounter problems with communications services that are hard to detect, isolate, and resolve which can cause user dissatisfaction and damage to brand image. 
  • Data integrity issues between the store and merchandising applications can lead to reconciliation issues, loss of financial transactions, inventory transactions, etc. 
  • The inability to ensure smooth functioning of the store’s open/close process due to issues like deployments, memory issues, etc. is another major problem. 
  • The presence of several POS application performance issues can cause slow transactions, delays and errors, increasing waiting time directly affecting customer experience & business revenues. 
  • The absence of optimized IT routines like batch processing, application monitoring, incident tracking can lead to the disruption of critical IT services. 
  • Sometimes retailers fail to understand that components like infrastructure and network are interconnected. When one of these fails, it will affect the other components thus affecting the business. 
  • Lack of an efficient monitoring system can lead to in-store operational issues like delayed store opens, patch deployment failures, thereby adversely impacting the business. 
  • Lack of automation often results in manual overload with repetitive/bulk tasks. 
  • Having inefficient systems can cause a negative impact on the business operations thereby increasing costs and adversely affecting the ROI.

Managed Services & Strategic Outcomes

It’s tough to keep pace in a world where technology is constantly developing and changing, but with the help of Oracle Managed Services, retailers can get the Oracle support needed to effectively manage and maintain their IT network. An Oracle Retail Managed Services team will work across time zones 24/7 and safeguard the health and accessibility of your Oracle Retail Technology investments. Retailers will be able to streamline various business processes and troubleshoot issues at the right time thereby creating a competitive advantage in the long run. If retailers are partnering with a Managed Services Provider, they will benefit from the best practices and from the DevOps and Agile methodology adopted to deliver small enhancements. Such providers also advise customers on what can be done to improve their solutions and critically enhance their systems.

Why Do Retailers Need Managed Services? 

  • Consistent high-level monitoring of the health of your Oracle Systems: With the help of Oracle Managed Services, periodic and daily health checks are conducted to ensure retailers seamlessly perform their merchandise operations. 
  • Disaster Recovery and Management: Backup and recovery procedures safeguard your database against data loss and help in the reconstruction of data, should data loss occur. 
  • Business process automation helps to eliminate manual entry and have an error-free data in the core applications. 
  • Optimized Incident Ticket Management helps to identify issues, outages in the Oracle infrastructure, and enable a service delivery user to create, update, resolve, and close incident tickets. 
  • Accelerated Upgrades helps to cross new frontiers to the next-gen technology thereby reducing costs and increasing ROI. 
  • DevOps for Oracle Retail Omnichannel Suite provides continuous monitoring of delivery pipelines, automation of build deployments leading to faster store rollouts and testing cycles. 
  • Pluggable accelerators can be developed for different Xstore suite versions. This automated monitoring and corrective process ensure the smooth functioning of the store’s open/close processes. 
  • Optimized Problem Management & Root Cause Analysis aims to resolve the root causes of incidents and minimizes the adverse impact of incidents and problems on business that are caused by errors within the Oracle IT infrastructure. 
  • Regular Maintenance activities like Performance tuning of Application, Database servers, Purging Activities are carried out to ensure better maintainability of the system and processes. 

With the time and cost savings, and liberated IT staff, retailers can invest in initiatives that meet their business needs and drive growth in these challenging times. 

Aspire’s Oracle Retail Managed Services

Aspire being an Oracle Retail Partner, is well–equipped to integrate and align with the ever-changing aspects of Oracle Retail Solutions. We understand the end-to-end Oracle Retail landscape which includes merchandise, planning, Omni channel Suite (Xstore POS, Oracle Customer Engagement, Oracle Order Broker, etc.), WMS, EOM, Cloud commerce, Retail Insights, etc. & provide a comprehensive range of Oracle Managed Services to monitor and manage the operation of your Oracle applications. We have accelerators that can automate business processes and result in a faster time-to-market.

With our service, customers can expect an increase in productivity by 70% & cost savings of up to 20%. We have helped a Norwegian Fashion Retailer optimize their business processes and improve productivity by 70% with our services. Aspire’s solution helped the client optimize their existing environment & maximize the return on their technology investment. Automation of formerly manual tasks brought about a marked improvement in productivity. And streamlining various business processes drove efficiency, business agility and delivered significant cost savings, thereby creating a competitive advantage in the long run. 

Contact us today if you want to streamline and optimize your business and more effectively manage the critical operations. You can learn more about how your business can succeed with Oracle Managed Solutions. 

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