Fashion retailer Mr Price Group offers affordable and unique fashion to South African consumers. With over 2,700 stores in 9 countries, the retailer recognized that it needed the right technology to improve its inventory management strategy across locations, as well as its growing array of distribution channels. With Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Services, Mr Price has the powerful platform it needs to automate best practices, better manage orders, optimize stock allocation, and keep up with consumer shopping preferences and future market demands by delivering a dynamic assortment of apparel and homeware.

“We needed to modernize our retail infrastructure and leverage cloud technology to establish a sustainable and stable application foundation for our high-volume processes,” said Kim Sim, Chief Information Officer, Mr Price. “Our vision is to be the most valuable retailer in Africa and know that Oracle’s proven cloud platform can help us meet the needs of our growing community.”

With help from Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) member OLR Retail, Mr Price shed their home-grown inventory management systems with custom-built designs and embarked on their journey to the cloud. With Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Services, Mr Price gains pricing, trade management, invoice matching, and sales audit capabilities out-of-the-box. With it, retailers can consolidate and simplify disparate processes across multiple business units into a single standardized process to help increase business agility and streamline operations. This implementation also built on Mr Price’s long-standing successful use of Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning.

“Oracle Retail Cloud Services was able to help us supercharge our unique business process, data models, and systems in the cloud to support each of our business units better,” said James Spalding, chief executive officer, OLR Retail. “As new capabilities are added to the platform, we can continually innovate to best serve our customers, business, and communities.”

The culture of change

The business transformation impacted merchandise planners, buyers, supply chain planners, finance experts, ecommerce experts, and technology teams.

“Change Management is not a person or a project team—it’s a collective culture across the business that needs support from the top executives in the company,” said Kim Sim of Mr Price. “Invest in your project team. We placed an intentional effort on building the right team culture of extreme ownership and psychological safety—which helped lead us to a successful implementation.”

“An enterprise transformation of this scale is not without its challenges, but with the pace of retail today, it’s riskier not to change,” said Antony Wildey, vice president of solution consulting, Oracle Retail. “Congratulations to the team at Mr Price for persevering through several unique environmental and geopolitical challenges to emerge with the modern platform that supports their future endeavors.”