|
With a portfolio of 60 premium brands combining proprietary brands and concepts like Empik, SMYK, and Empik Cafe, as well as exclusive franchise and license brands including Hugo Boss, Mango, Esprit, Mexx, River Island as well as Dior, Chanel, Clarins, Shiseido and many others, the NFI Empik Media & Fashion Group (EM&F) operates over 590 retail and service outlets and language schools across Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany.
In 2007, it selected and implemented Oracle Retail planning applications to provide a unified approach to planning and forecasting activities across its retail portfolio and support the growth and internationalisation of its business. Commencing the project with the SMYK chain of children’s stores, EM&F deployed the solutions within six months and has already revealed considerable benefits from standardising and centralising planning and forecasting processes. It is continuing to roll-out Oracle Retail to its Ultimate Fashion and Maratex portfolio of fashion brands.
“We chose to start the project with SMYK because it is such a successful concept in Poland, and one that we have strong expansion plans for internationally. The Oracle Retail planning applications could help drive the expansion of this brand quickly and effectively,” says Dariusz Stolarczyk, COO and SCM of EM&F.
A unified view of the supply chain
“Our strategy is to maintain double digit growth over the next few years but these expansion plans bring challenges in terms of managing our retail and service outlets. The creation of a best practice approach has enabled us to build a unified view of the planning and forecasting processes at SMYK and centrally manage them,” says Stolarczyk.
The Oracle Retail solutions have provided EM&F with an integrated, scalable platform that provides visibility to merchandise throughout SMYK’s supply chain. This improvement means that management can now monitor product flow from China through to the distribution warehouses in Warsaw, Berlin and Moscow, and then out to the stores. This is helping EM&F as it develops key initiatives focused on building a centrally-managed supply chain model that operates across Europe.
Taking a proactive approach
The implementation of the various Oracle Retail planning tools is enabling EM&F to operate a more proactive and consistent approach to its planning activities at SMYK. “Planning processes can be based on several hundred indicators. If a retailer operates only a few stores, it is possible to manage this. When you’re expanding to the level our business is, this no longer becomes viable. The trick is to make processes as consistent as possible and to choose a fewer number of significant indexes upon which we can make decisions. Oracle Retail has helped us to revise our traditional processes and develop capabilities that support our whole business,” says Stolarczyk.
Oracle Retail Assortment Execution has supported a significant enhancement in SMYK’s capabilities to tailor assortments to local demand and improve the flow and life cycle of merchandise in line with financial objectives. One of the key benefits that the solution offers is its ability to manage assortment plans for hardline and softline categories, something EM&F had failed to identify in other applications on the market.
“Identifying the KPIs of particular assortments in particular stores has been a revelation. Successful and profitable merchandising comes from knowing and understanding who our customers are, which items and how much they buy, and which promotions they best respond to in different stores. Since implementing the Oracle Retail planning applications, we’ve become more proactive in our approach to the management of our markdowns at SMYK. The lack of visibility to accurate and real-time data meant we were reactive in our approach, but we are now able to identify the success of particular markdown campaigns over others,” explains Stolarczyk.
Driving insight into decision-making
Taking advantage of the Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning tool has enabled EM&F to develop its pre-season and in-season planning with financial indicators that include sales, open-to-buy, receipts and gross margin. Improving visibility to open-to-buy planning is proving particularly beneficial with many of SMYK’s inventory being both seasonal and incurring lengthy life cycles.
Oracle Retail is helping to determine inventory requirements at the item and location level, promoting the allocation of the right quantities of products to individual SMYK stores. “Insight into the allocation of goods is helping us to improve customer satisfaction by matching appropriate stock levels to customer demand, and minimising lost sales and overstocking,” said Stolarczyk.
In addition to the planning applications, EM&F implemented Oracle Siebel solutions to provide business intelligence for its retail business. Within five weeks of implementation, EM&F had uncovered valuable information on commercial, store and product successes, driving greater insight into daily operations.
With the SMYK brand, this has promoted the development of deeper planning cycles around seasons and key periods in the calendar like holidays. This insight has also revealed the effectiveness of individual stores across the SMYK network, allowing management to research why the performance in particular stores is more profitable than in others and replicate these learnings across business operations. Such changes have also driven other changes to the business and the commercial calendar now operates from Sunday to Saturday, supporting the development of more qualitative, modern retail processes.
Why Oracle?
A comprehensive review of EM&F’s IT systems in 2007 revealed a lack of effective planning and forecasting capabilities to support its expansion strategy. Oracle Retail featured prominently in a review of the market, particularly in its successful relationships with some of the largest global fashion retailers. In addition, its relationship with Accenture and its strong local implementation team in Poland helped to cement the selection decision.
Stolarczyk explains: “EM&F has different challenges to many other retail businesses because we manage both fashion and hardline operations. We need to take different approaches to the management of our fashion stores, as we do to the management of our SMYK children’s portfolio for example, as these products have different seasonality, life cycles and markdown requirements. Our review of the market revealed Oracle’s proven capabilities and support for both fashion and hardline operations.”
Implementation
EM&F mapped out its objectives for implementation in early 2007. Having selected Oracle in May 2007, EM&F set up a change management group incorporating personnel from EM&F, SMYK, Accenture, Oracle and Exorigo. Lead by SMYK’s head of planning and analysis, who acted as the project sponsor, this team of IT specialists and personnel from different areas of the business including HR, fashion and finance reviewed the strategic implications of the implementation, preparing guidelines to keep the colleagues informed of the project integration through a series of training and educational materials. Implementation at SMYK progressed in July 2007 and was completed in only six months, enabling go-live of the solution across its 55 stores.
“Integration will always be a challenge, no matter how simple the project. We worked closely with the Oracle and Accenture project teams to build the system, input the data and conduct test scenarios to ensure that we could get the system running effectively quickly and efficiently. We achieved this within four months and were impressed with the commitment of the implementation team to meet our challenges,” says Stolarczyk..
top
|
