Growing Fashion Retailer Taps Oracle to Increase Focus on Customers

Sportina, a leading fashion retailer in southeast Europe is using Oracle Retail to modernize its operations and better serve customers, however they chose to shop. Sportina curates fashion collections for women, men, and children across 90 brands, including Hugo Boss, Burberry, Dsquared, Superdry, Tom Tailor, Jack&Jones and Marx in more than 350 stores across 11 countries. With Oracle, Sportina was able to standardize its diverse business on a modern retail technology platform to break down barriers between geographies and brands to optimize inventory availability for customers.  

“Sportina Group supports a range of different business models, including our own brand, multi-brand, franchise, and wholesale. In order to support this complexity, we recognized the need to centralize and consolidate our planning processes to deliver transparency,” Miha Rozman, head of controlling, Sportina. “Sportina is an efficient and fast-moving fashion retailer. We chose Oracle to improve efficiency and increase productivity. Most importantly, this modernization allowed us to design a new planning process that places the customer at the center of our operations from the strategic vision through the planning to execution.”

Today, Sportina segments its portfolio brands into five segments including luxury, premium, core, entry and casual. The segmentation respects customers’ individual style, preference and uniqueness while evoking passion, creativity, and fun by delivering relevant offers that drive loyalty. By delivering what a consumer wants, Sportina can avoid markdowns and increase gross margin. With full visibility to inventory availability across all channels, the Sportina team can decrease transfer costs and increase stock rotation.

“Culturally, we are an organization driven by the entrepreneurial spirit. Through our collaborative initiative with Oracle, we were able to outline the responsibilities, accountability, and ownership across the business and design a platform that supported and optimized each. With the modernization, we gained full stock availability throughout all channels,” said David Rezar, head of merchandise planning, Sportina. “We have increased the stock rotation and decreased transfer costs by implementing an initial and replenishment order split.”

Working with Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) member Pronos, Sportina implemented Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning in 16 weeks. This was followed by an implementation of an Oracle Retail Lifecycle Inventory Planning framework designed by Oracle Retail Consulting in under eight months. Pronos provided broad mutli-branded fashion implementation experience. Next, Pronos will continue to support Sportina on their digital transformation with the implementation of Oracle Retail Offer Optimization.

“Convenience is king for customers. They want to go online or in a store and get what they are looking for quickly,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president, and general manager, Oracle Retail. “To deliver on this, brands must put customers at the center of their planning process. This means ensuring the right inventory is moved to the right locations to appeal to customer interests and needs. With Oracle, Sportina has been able to reimagine this entire process to improve both business efficiency and customer outcomes.”