Home Improvement Specialist Builds Better Customer Experiences with Oracle

SINSA, the largest home improvement retailer in Nicaragua, has tapped Oracle Retail as the foundation to deliver superior customer experiences and propel growth. In business for nearly 30 years, the family-owned retailer operates 24 retail stores and wholesale properties, offering 65,000+ SKUs in 15 categories of home improvement products and services for the remodeling, construction, decoration and electrical industries. By adopting Oracle Retail technology, the Do-it-Yourself (DIY) retailer can now provide improved customer service through better inventory control.

“Innovation is at the core of our DNA and SINSA is constantly looking at how we can improve our operations,” said Roger Vargas, continuous improvement manager, SINSA. “Our focus is to better serve the customer with improved inventory control and transition all processes to digital, which is key to gaining agility in the modern retail environment. The Oracle Retail project has been transformational, we are delivering on our vision to become more agile and satisfy our customer’s needs through a digital transformation process that starts by analyzing our processes, making adjustments and adopting a modern platform that can help us reduce risks and bring scalability to our business units as we continue to grow.”

SINSA has four business units, with retail accounting for 75 percent of company sales, followed by project and engineering services, wholesale, and car battery distribution. The SINSA store operation has a unique style where customers can negotiate the cost of products with the sales associate. Within a specific range, the associate can offer a discount, which contributes to delivering an even more exciting and dynamic shopping experience. Customers can choose from store pick up and distribution center (DC) pick up, as well as create quotations and come on a later date to process those quotations into sales. As such, providing associates with the latest information on their buyers and store inventory is critical.

“Retailers need to move beyond just selling what they buy and architect business processes that consider every attribute associated with items, orders, inventory and customers. When data is spread across disparate systems, customer profiles are incomplete. It is necessary for retailers to build informed workflows by mining buyer attributes to build comprehensive customer profiles. Oracle delivers a platform for modern retail that informs and executes; providing the agility companies like SINSA require to keep pace with the changing needs of their business,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president, and general manager, Oracle Retail.

While the project is still in its early days, SINSA is already able to point to operational improvements. For example, the increased degree of detail at the item level is helping improve the efficiency of replenishment in warehousing. SINSA also reduced the wait time in stores by 33 percent using modern Point of Sale systems, which has positively impacted customer satisfaction. Through a CRM focused in retail, SINSA now has a detailed view of customer needs and can provide a personalized shopping experience.

“Technology needs to support this dynamic environment at the store level, and our in-house system required modernization. With Oracle Retail, all associates can access transactions anywhere including on their computers or from their mobile phones,” said Edwin Gonzalez Mendoza, IT manager, SINSA. “We adapted payment options and a store operation process to fit our customer service model. The new hybrid on-premise and cloud infrastructure brought us the right combination to gain the speed and agility we needed in our business.”

SINSA implemented Oracle Retail Merchandising System, Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning, Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service, Oracle Retail Customer Engagement, Oracle Retail Order Broker, and Oracle ERP Cloud with help from Oracle PartnerNetwork Platinum level partner SkillNet.  SkillNet provided local resources with language capabilities, in-depth knowledge of the retail industry, and Oracle Retail solution expertise.