V16: Oracle Retail Cloud Services -
How Does it Benefit Retailers?

There has been a significant cloud transition across industries, especially Retail. According to IDC, worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow at a 19.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). This shows how cloud has taken an important role in the growth of enterprises. Understanding the key complexities that retailers face in order to cope up with the modern business standards and customer demands, Oracle has expanded its cloud services through its latest Oracle Retail version 16 which has more than 33 cloud-enabled retail services.

Oracle Retail Cloud v16 is aimed at helping retailers to adopt cloud technology at their convenience and deliver a unified customer experience across eCommerce and physical stores. Retailers can achieve faster time to market, increased reliability and 100% up time to handle heavy traffic especially during peak seasons – all at reduced cost.

Oracle’s Cloud First strategy enables us to deliver a steady cadence of innovation to our global retail customers, and we are taking the industry’s leading retail science and best practices to a new level with Oracle Retail Release 16”, said Ray Carlin, SVP and GM of Oracle Retail.

Cloud Services – What’s in it for Retailers?

Retailers have realized the importance of building businesses around customers so they are free to use any channel to shop regardless of time and place. With cloud, retailers can now have the added benefits of maximizing their productivity and enabling them to quickly adapt to the modern retailing standards.

According to a Business 2 Community report, 37% of SMBs have adopted some kind of cloud solution. This is because Oracle Retail v16 has retail solutions right from planning to execution and even more. The solutions could be merchandise planning, inventory management, customer engagement, Omni-channel features, responsive websites, gaining customer insights or even generating critical reports.

Retailers can make use of the Plan-Execute-Report strategy to conveniently take full advantage of Oracle Retail’s latest version.

Plan

To start with, Oracle Retail Merchandise Planning and Optimization helps retailers to forecast and create merchandise, financial, assortment, and allocation plans. It increases cross channel planning and collaboration and enables to make informed decisions based on various insights from customers. This is because modern retailing is all about extracting insights from customer’s purchases, behavior, preferences and buying patterns. These insights help retailers to optimize their products and offer personalized offers that will increase customer engagement and loyalty.

Oracle Retail Customer Insights Cloud Service helps retailers with actionable insights by providing them a 360-degree view of their customers.

The solution takes advantage of several Oracle operations like merchandising and customer engagement (Oracle Retail Customer Engagement) to enable retailers drive repeat purchases by segmenting customer information and further build customer loyalty programs through gift cards, promotional offers, coupons and awards.

Al Nahdi, the largest medical chains in Africa and Middle East, deployed Oracle Retail Advanced Science Engine Cloud Service, Oracle Retail Merchandising Solutions, and Oracle Retail Category Management. As a result, they were able to effectively segment their customers and use scientific insights to forecast their merchandising figures and increase the accuracy of planning.


We are able to plan and execute better assortment of products across our stores to improve our guests’ satisfaction,”
said Dr. Khalid Tadlaoui, Vice President of Information Technology, Nahdi Medical Company.

Execute

Secondly, order management is the core of any retail business. Oracle offers robust Retail order management system Cloud service where retailers can effectively leverage customer information along with workflow options to streamline order handling across multiple channels. Retailers can also have real time access to customer order, inventory visibility and availability to show the accurate expected delivery time. The solution can be easily integrated with other Ecommerce and POS solutions, thereby delivering a consistent customer experience.

Seamless Omni-channel Transactions

Oracle Retail Order Broker Cloud Service helps retailers to identify and assign orders to the stores based on the available inventory. Because of this, retailers can maintain accurate stock information so that customers are aware of the stock availability and place their orders accordingly. Its real time inventory information ensures that no sales are missed through their ‘save the sale’ strategy.

The Oracle Retail Order Broker Cloud Service has three important components that assist in fulfilling omni-channel retailing.

Store Connect helps stores to perform omnichannel transactions. It notifies the store new orders and manages end to end transaction activities including alerting customers about their delivery status.

Oracle Retail Supplier Direct Fulfillment module enables flexible and smooth drop ship ordering by directly transferring the customer’s purchase order and shipment details to the supplier, thus minimizing inventory cost.

Oracle Science Engine that is embedded within the Oracle Broker solution uses mathematical modeling and fetches the order information from the routing engine to identify the most eligible location or even allowing customers to choose their preferred pick-up or delivery locations.

Annually, retailers suffer from over $120 billion worth of shrinkage ,that amounts to 1.44% of total sales. Oracle offers an intelligent and intuitive analytical reporting solution that enables retailers to identify and investigate losses from fraud and non-compliance through Oracle Retail XBRi Loss Prevention Cloud Services 16.0.

Report

It has interactive dashboards where users can easily locate high-risk areas and get notified about the most unlikely anomalies. Retailers can greatly reduce their operational cost, IT intervention and shrinkage with proven ROI. It also provides multi-dimensional analyses through its dynamic OLAP engine, where retailers can gain a 360 degree perspective on the data through graphs and other visual charts.

 

Aspire’s Expertise in Oracle Retail Cloud Implementation

Oracle’s retail strategy of ‘Empowered Commerce’ is to enable retailers to deliver commerce anywhere. Even though Cloud implementation is one of the less complicated infrastructure solutions, it requires Subject Matter Experts to meticulously configure the system to meet customer and business requirements. For this reason, it’s important to hire expert consultants for smooth cloud deployment.

Aspire has consultants with high end expertise in implementing cloud services across diverse industries and verticals, and offers a broad range of Oracle retail cloud services.

 

With the growing market competence and the changing trends, Aspire’s strategy of Plan-Execute-Report can help retailers implement Oracle Retail cloud systems that gains customers’ confidence through the best of breed cloud solutions.

 

Author Name : Sharon Paul, Research Analyst

Practice Head :Chetan Singh, Store Solutions Architect