Retail Planning and Optimization

Switch from a merchandise planning process that’s product-centric to one that’s customer-focused. Define your assortment, placement, pricing, promotions, and product lifecycles to grow profitability with retail planning.

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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail Pricing 2023 Vendor Assessment

Key use cases for global retail planning

Improve the efficiency of your buying teams

Turbocharge merchandise, inventory, and planning processes, and deliver a more compelling and localized product assortment for consumers.

Create a holistic and unified planning process

Leverage key performance indicators to embrace changing consumer expectations, set new targets, allocate more precise budgets, and deliver attractive assortments.

Put customers at the center of your operations

Deploy a quick implementation with a planning process that places customers at the center of your operations, from the strategic vision to execution.

Make effective pricing decisions and minimize markdowns

Protect your margins. Use targeted promotions, markdowns, and offers to maximize profits and sell-through.

Retail inventory planning software features

Choose a retail planning solution that provides a strong foundation and opportunities for more profitable inventory investments, with the help of retail AI and ML.

Oracle Retail AI Foundation

Leverage core retail AI and ML to make decisions on assortments, offers, inventory placement, forecasts, planning, buying, pricing, etc.

Forecasting engine

Provide an intelligent starting point for your planners to increase automation and accuracy.

Customer segmentation

Group customers based on attributes, behaviors, and transactions to tailor offers, pricing, and assortments.

Advanced clustering (PDF)

Cluster your stores based on traditional approaches of volume, square footage, and region, or leverage ML to cluster stores based on similar selling patterns.

Profile science

Determine the best size ratio for your buys by understanding the true demand of your sizes, considering stockouts.

Attribute extraction and binning

Extract item attributes from free-form descriptions, correcting short forms, misspellings, and other inconsistencies, and apply them to demand transference, customer decision trees, advanced clustering, and more.

Affinity analysis (PDF)

Determine how items interact with each other for an effective promotional strategy within your financial planning process.

Innovation workbench

Leverage open source along with your data science team to create your own AI and ML models.

Retail AI

Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning improves plan accuracy

Increase profits

Identify opportunities for more profitable inventory investments while ensuring day-to-day decisions align with business objectives. Support proactive retail management, resulting in fewer lost sales, excessive markdowns, and unprofitable exit strategies.

Integrated forecasting

Base plans on accurate demand forecasts, rather than focusing on sales history. Eliminate plan discrepancies and organizational silos with reconciled plan visibility into all departments.

Improved accuracy

Provide views into sales history, actualized weekly sales, and unconstrained forecasts to support better, more accurate planning.

Increased return on investment

Enable receipt flow planning down to the weekly level to maximize return on inventory investment and align promotional activities with strategic goals by geography, class, category, and selling channel.

Reduced markdowns

Ensure that bottom-up item plans reconcile with top-down financial plans, preventing overstocks.

Merchandise Financial Planning

Oracle Retail Assortment Planning helps meet demand

Plan assortments with ease

Align assortments using a highly visual, end-to-end workflow. Define and execute local market and microsite assortments, improve conversion of traffic into higher sales/margins, and increase customer satisfaction.

Optimize assortment strategy and creation

AI and automation help to provide an effective assortment strategy to maximize return on inventory investment. By factoring in assortment trends or attribute mix from last year, style-color performance by location, and one-off and special buys, get a recommended rate of sale and target options as a benchmark for merchants and planners.

React to in-season trends and opportunities

The in-season business process provides planners with the ability to react quickly and effectively to season-to-date actuals and trends with exception management. With one version of the truth, a common business process, and calculations with smart starting points, planners can easily review and update sales, promotions, and markdown plans.

Assortment Planning

Oracle Retail Category Management

Maximize performance and increase customer satisfaction

Consolidate multiple data sources into an easy-to-consume format, gaining actionable insights and recommendations to drive customer-centric and targeted assortments.

One version of the truth

Recommend formal category roles, strategies, and tactics based on consumer insights and product performance for use in downstream assortment, pricing, promotion, inventory, and space processes.

Review and analyze preseason and in-season category performance

Monitor performance and validate key initiatives are tracking as planned with scorecards related to promotions, private label products, and inventory.

Key benefits

  • Provide a fact-based smart starting point, enabling you to refine inventory based on category/store base knowledge.
  • Integrate and align category and assortment decisions with financial and space targets/constraints.
  • Leverage retail AI inputs, exclusively available via Oracle Cloud.
  • Enable a 360-degree view of the market, customers, competitors, and vendors.
Category Management

Oracle Retail Assortment and Space Optimization maximizes product placement

Optimize return on space

Optimize assortments to available space to maximize planogram performance, return on space, sales, revenue, and profits.

Drive profit and remain flexible to the changing retail environment

Optimize assortments to store- and cluster-specific needs to maximize return on space, sales, and gross profit while maintaining visual merchandising standards and supply chain considerations.

Improve customer satisfaction

Optimize assortment and placement for the available space for each store to improve customer satisfaction.

Turn data into value

  • Conduct macro-space optimization what-if analysis to maximize profits.
  • Create assortment and facing recommendations while balancing supply chain constraints, business rules, and visual merchandising standards.
  • Leverage fixture data to dynamically create store and space clusters.
  • Use item-level demand transference in calculations to create optimal assortment mix.
Assortment and Space Optimization

Oracle Retail Data Store helps leverage retail data

Oracle Retail Data Store is a low-cost, low-code environment that enables retailers to innovate, take control of their data, and extend the capabilities of their Oracle Retail cloud services.

Oracle Retail Data Store is highly scalable and configurable to support the constantly changing retail landscape. It consolidates data on sales, inventory, pricing, promotions, customers, orders, demand, fulfillment, items, suppliers, consumers, and channels to support a retailer’s unique business processes and journeys.

Retail Data Store includes powerful tools to leverage all of this data

  • Oracle Retail Home
  • Oracle Analytics
  • Oracle APEX
  • Oracle REST Data Services

Data store

Oracle Retail planning and optimization customer success stories

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Retail planning resources

Oracle named a Leader

Learn why Oracle is named a Leader in “The Forrester Wave: Retail Planning Platforms, Q4 2023."

Access the report

Nine ways to optimize assortment planning

When retailers use these tips, they enter the fashion season with robust assortments that set them apart from the competition.

Get the tips

A pricing strategy for success

When bringing new fashion and apparel products to market, an optimal pricing strategy will attract new customers and retain current ones, establish or reinforce the brand’s image, and increase profits without stifling demand.

Set a winning strategy

Predict the unpredictable

Learn how AI-based analytics can help retailers make better decisions amid a cacophony of data.

Access the ebook

Get started with Oracle Retail planning solutions

Contact Oracle Retail

Reach out to discuss next steps with a retail solution expert.

Join the Oracle RACK

Explore research, reports, webinars, and customer presentations that can help you better understand the power of Oracle Retail products.

Connect with the Oracle Retail user community

Oracle Retail customers meet regularly to share best practices and build networks.

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