Oracle Merchandising Solution Tops Shopping List for Bosnian Grocers

When customers enter a Mercator or Konzum supermarket, they discover a plethora of organic products, fresh chopped salads, and meat ripening chambers intermingled with everyday grocery needs. The dominant grocery brands in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) employ a visual standard and layout that maximizes the display of products across various segments. By upgrading to the latest release of Oracle Retail, the trading department can automate the merchandising process and offer guided best practice to associates, allowing them to focus on strategic tasks that impact the bottom line and improve daily operational efficiency.

“The common user interface of our new retail merchandising system (RMS) simplifies the day to day activities while allowing for flexibility where the business demands it. Once our buyers got the hang of the new system we began to see a marked improvement in the speed and efficiency in which they could get their daily, previously tedious, tasks completed,” said Željka Mujezinović, IT manager, Mercator BH d.o.o. (B&H). The Mercator relationship with Oracle began in 2017.

“With the time saved they can spend more time on higher-value tasks and focusing on optimizing our merchandising strategy,” said Džemal Vejsil, IT manager, Konzum d.o.o. (B&H). The Konzum relationship began in 2016.

In the recent Topography of Retail Report, nearly 6,400 European consumers surveyed prioritized competitive pricing and general promotions (78 percent) as one of the most compelling attributes of shopping experience. With Oracle Retail Merchandising, Konzum and Mercator BH buyers will be able to implement differential pricing strategies and multi-buy and transaction promotions easily and pass those savings on to customers. In the future, consumers can take advantage of multi-buy transactions where the more you buy, the more you save. The buyers will be able to evaluate new promotion options to ensure more consistent pricing levels for store shoppers.  

“Retailers need a world-class, modern platform and the ability to interact across all areas of the organization seamlessly. We believe that every retail process should start and end with analytics and business intelligence. Oracle collaborated with 50 retailers, such as Mercator BH and Konzum, to rewrite our merchandising solution and establish the persona and correlated activities to drive operational agility and better business insights,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail.

“We had mStart consultants and customer team members working closely with Oracle on this project. We aligned across the Trading and Purchasing departments to avoid disruption to the business, resulting in the implementation being completed on-time and on-budget for the customer in January 2019,” said Želimira Ivček, Director of Oracle Retail Systems at mStart Plus d.o.o.

mStart Plus d.o.o. is a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

Retailers Tap Oracle AI to Better Serve Customers

The competition in retail is fierce and great products alone are no longer enough. Whether shopping online or in person, customers want seamless, personalized shopping experiences. Helping retailers compete by making better use of their data, Oracle continues to weave significant artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities into its Retail Insights and Science Suite.

With new features, such as notebook-based data science tools, retailers can quickly deploy new data science-driven solutions to further engage and delight customers across channels. As an example, a retailer can build machine learning models within their Oracle Retail solutions to extract insights from images, sense demand from social media, or re-balance inventory to maximize productivity. 

“Notebook-based solutions offer open source without the hassles,” according to Forrester1. They leverage innovations in open source machine learning to enable data scientists to create models in their development languages of choice, such as Python or R. As such, they can speed new learnings that can both enhance the customer experience and bottom line results. 

A leading Saudi Arabia pharmacy retailer, Nahdi Medical Company, applied these principles when they needed to create a new AI and machine learning model that could correlate customer engagement with marketing campaigns to identify and reward loyal customers. 

“By taking the innovative predictive models provided by Oracle Retail Science Platform Cloud Service and coupling them with our analytics intellectual property, we’ll be able to understand and predict our guests’ behavior which will give us the opportunities to serve them better,” said Dr. Ayman Abdalazem, head of business intelligence and analytics, Nahdi Medical Company. “Selecting a cloud platform for data science has enabled us to quickly implement the solution while minimizing technical debt and accelerating the value we extract for Nahdi Medical Company.”

Standout Features of the Oracle Retail Insights and Science Suite

With the Retail Science and Insights Suite business leaders and data scientists can deliver faster decisions with greater precision and innovations that drive tangible results.

“Most machine learning projects fall short on delivering tangible business benefits. Not because the innovation is misaligned with a business objective but because it is difficult to operationalize innovation,” said Jeff Warren, vice president, Oracle Retail. “The Retail Science Platform delivers the standardization and controls that enterprises need to accelerate their new offerings and swiftly integrate them into their business workflows. With the addition of notebook-based tools, our solution is a force to be reckoned with in predictive analytics and machine learning for the retail industry.”

New advances include:

• Notebook-based predictive analytics and machine learning solutions that give retailers the ability to bring innovations to market with faster speed and efficiency.
• Customer Lifetime Value, RFM and Engagement Score are now available in the Retail Insights suite so that retailers can manage to essential, modern retail KPIs associated with acquiring and retaining customers.
• Affinity Analysis enhancements that enable retailers to drill down into critical information and answer questions such as, “How do affinities for a particular store compare to the region?” and “What were the halo effects of a particular event?”

“Retailers all know they need advanced analytics and retail science to drive their business forward, but they don’t all have the luxury of hiring on a data science team,” said Marc Koehler, solution director, Oracle Retail. “We continue to enhance Oracle Retail Insights and Science Suite to provide retailers with packaged insights and science applications, including Customer Insights Cloud Service and Offer Optimization Cloud Service, as well as the innovation workbench so that they can leverage best of both worlds.”