Empowering the business comes with fueling the operations the right way, which in turn enables retailers to cater to the business demands and customer needs with complete precision. Timing and seamlessness is of essence in today’s real time Omnichannel scenario. To keep on improving services and reach operational excellence business users need to stay abreast with the latest developments in merchandise and operations planning. This will help them in countering modern day retail market problems.

Present problems in the commerce scenario:

  1. Operational units (pricing, promotions, inventory management etc.) acting in silos adversely impacting customer experience.
  2. The lack of automation leading to time and labor consuming operational tasks.
  3. Difficulty in maintaining uniformity among various business channels.
  4. Lengthy, complicated updating of documents and loading of data.
  5. Operational platforms mostly unsupported by mobile devices leading to time consuming decision making processes.
  6. The lack of personalized dashboards on the decision makers’ table, so they are not able to find the problems on time which need immediate action.
  7. Unavailability of on premise and cloud capabilities of business optimizing solutions.

Empowered commerce with Oracle v16:

As a business owner if you have been using Oracle’s retail merchandize operations planning suite or are wishing to opt for it, there’s good news for you. It’s just come out with a newer, more customized version of the retail suite. This integrated suite of solutions includes the following:

  1. Oracle Retail Merchandising System (RMS)
  2. Oracle Retail Sales Audit (ReSA)
  3. Oracle Retail Trade Management (RTM)
  4. Oracle Retail Invoice Matching (ReIM)
  5. Oracle Retail Price Management (RPM)
  6. Oracle Retail Allocation (Allocation)

It’s an end to end merchandize operations management solution giving retailers more in depth view of their organizations and helping in making the right decisions at the right time. The suite, available both on premise and on cloud is focused on providing a unified consumer experience across channels. The newly enhanced V16 suite has incorporated features to better facilitate Omnichannel retail, enhanced user experience and easy configurations according to business needs.

New features:

Modern UX: Enhanced BI (configurable charts, tables), user centric design and easy to use dashboards are some of the new UI features of the new suite.

Role based dashboards: Intuitive dashboards which bring to the front the errors that need to be dealt with on a priority basis depending on the role of the person using the dashboard. For instance the person handing the merchandise stock in store will get to see what products are missing or other stocking related issues. This enables faster response time in cases of exceptions detected.  Part of RMS, RTM, these dashboards allow coordination with team with emails and are configurable according to departmental needs.

Data visualization tools: Create reports, add links to news/social media feeds or other reports establishing scenarios and make visual summaries. The added advantage is that allocation and invoice matching reports can also be added and created on preferred framework on the new dashboards.

Omnichannel retail: Bringing all channels together for one unified experience for every customer. This makes sure that your store has similar pricing for every product (RPM), discounts, inventory, delivery time and one customer profile across all channels.

“Cross-channel retail sales will reach $1.8 Trillion by 2017.” –Forrester

Connected warehouses: Allocation is not based on the only one warehouse (source warehouse), version v16 will allow connected warehouses to facilitate availability of stock across channels. Now when a customer orders a product it will be provided from a more conveniently located warehouse to optimize the time of delivery and service.

Data management: Now make updates and changes to foundation data without the challenges of handling excel sheets (ReSA). The system also eases the load of initial loading of foundational data. The new document induction process also enables induction of invoices from suppliers.

Better accounting: Auditing is simplified using ReSA as it can rectify mass audit errors occurring throughout the day in one or across multiple stores.  Financial posting errors can be managed without technical support by users. Invoice matching performed by users can also be unmatched by them now which will help in sales error resolution without third party help.

Mobile and tablet: There are two new mobile applications introduced which enables users to view and approve recent orders and transfers on the go, also send emails linking them to respective teams to keep them updated. Tablet is also supported on the new V16 suite.

“By 2020, 80% of the world population will own a smartphone.” Forrester.

Easy configuration: Each and every new feature is easily configurable. The new version supports more robust features like search with multiple search windows. Added is fully configurable tables, language, data and time and number format to suit each store.

Store allocation: The new version helps in creating localized, customer focused store plans. Store plans can be made including various currencies and preferred languages.

Benefits:

“80% increase in productivity through more streamlined integrated processes.” Oracle.

The new version of Oracle V16 aims to anticipate requirements, simplify operations, and inspire better actions.

  1. Connected operations across organization leading to a more efficient workflow. Enhanced customer service with seamlessness of service across channels.
  2. Faster decision making and increased employee productivity with role based dashboards. As priority scenarios are highlighted to the users they can take real-time actions to tackle them.
  3. Mobile and tablet support will help decision makers implement faster decisions anytime and anyplace. Buying approvals and order placing don’t need to wait.
  4. Better inventory management with complete view across warehouses. Select warehouse located closer to the customer or with better stock to provide faster and better service to customer.
  5. Real time data updates, document induction and change without the need for scripting leads to time saving simplified processes.
  6. Lesser dependency on technical support as users with appropriate access can manage sales report related issues like matching and unmatching invoices, and correcting wrong financial posting.
  7. Handling accounts is easier and less error prone with automated error detection and error solving.
  8. Having both on premise and cloud capabilities, the solution offers the customers the flexibility to choose and to migrate in their own time.

 

Right implementation with the right partner:

The Oracle retail suite is built to suit your business architecture and needs. To obtain the best results from the suite for your business you require an implementation partner with the right expertise. They should have good understanding of your retail needs and the customer segment you cater to. Aspire, an Oracle partner, can provide the right implementation capabilities and help you achieve the benefits from this suite by making appropriate configurations made to fit that will improve upon your business structure.