WH Smith North America (WHSNA), incorporating Marshall Retail Group—America’s leading specialty retailer in the airport marketplace, is leveraging Oracle’s retail cloud platform to better manage planning and inventory across its 300+ specialty airport and casino stores across the US and Canada. WHSNA’s stores include company-owned and household brands such as Harley-Davidson, In Motion, LEGO and TUMI. With Oracle’s AI-backed cloud solutions, the WHSNA planning team can deliver a more accurate inventory plan with optimal assortment, styles and size recommendations, providing the right merchandise in the right brands and locations to create and meet customer expectations.

“We have a great track record of fast and successful implementations with Oracle Retail,” said Josh Bellendir, chief information officer of WHSNA. “We engaged Columbus Consulting to evaluate planning solutions to replace our aging technology, and we chose Oracle and RetSci for their combined retail expertise and speed to market. By choosing a modern, AI-supported platform, we can expand our planning capabilities and streamline business operations while increasing customer satisfaction.”

The brand implemented Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service in just 16 weeks, enabling merchandise and location planners to streamline work and identify opportunities for more profitable inventory investments while ensuring day-to-day decisions align with business objectives. It also leverages Oracle Retail Artificial Intelligence Foundation Cloud Service, part of Oracle Retail Analytics and Planning Cloud Services. The two Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications provide extensible analytics and AI to drive optimal planning decisions.  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) enables the performance and scalability of the Oracle retail solutions.

“This collaboration was great between WH Smith North America, Columbus Consulting, Oracle, and RetSci. The collective team managed the scope of the implementation to deliver mission-critical capabilities quickly,” said Bill Zacher, Chief Operating Officer of RetSci.

“WH Smith North America is one of the first customers to deploy our Oracle retail cloud platform with AI Foundation,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president, and general manager, Oracle Retail. “With these applications, WH Smith North America can scale data models across its operations and benefit from powerful predictive and prescriptive analytics to better forecast demand, improve inventory accuracy, and reduce markdowns and over-stocks to help increase customer satisfaction and profits.”

In 2020, WHSNA also upgraded its in-store technology to Oracle Retail. In 100 days, WHSNA moved its stores to the modern Oracle Retail Store Point-of-Service (POS) with implementation partner BTM Global.