Oracle has unveiled Oracle Retail Merchandising Analytics to offer retailers a new prebuilt business intelligence application that incorporates performance metrics across the entire enterprise and promotes a faster response to market opportunities.
"This is a merchandising-specific business intelligence application," David Dorf, senior director of technology strategy for Oracle Retail, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The solution provides insight to critical performance indicators such as item sales, store performance, effectiveness of promotions and markdowns, inventory turn, sales and profit trends, as well as current and potential out-of-stocks.
Oracle Retail Merchandising Analytics is built on the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications platform, and enables users to access and analyze data from multiple applications such as financial and workforce management, customer relationship management (CRM) and retail operations.
Pulling in information from a range of areas, the solution targets the needs of a range of users, from chief merchandising officers to buyers and merchandise managers, so that everyone has access to the same information, says Dorf.
Included across all of the business intelligence dashboards is the ability to act on insights gained, thereby enabling users to order more stock, re-allocate merchandise or kick off a promotion triggered by metric thresholds. The "closed-loop analytics" uses embedded actions to make it easier for users to act on the information they view in a dashboard or report
The new solution is part of a family of Oracle Retail Analytics business intelligence applications that will be expanded, Dorf adds.
Oracle Retail Analytics applications are optimized to run on Oracle Exadata Database Machine. In addition, the applications integrate with Oracle and non-Oracle applications and can be implemented alone or collectively to accommodate each retailer's specific information requirements and application environment. Reports can be delivered to mobile devices and desktops in a variety of formats, a capability further enabled by the application's use of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.