Oracle Customer Success—mStart d.o.o.

mStart Enhances Service and Reduces Transportation Costs with Oracle Big Data

Thanks to the profound insights delivered in real time by Oracle Big Data Appliance, we have increased our ability to respond to the needs of more than 1 million loyalty card holders who regularly use our retail network. We also expect to reduce our transportation costs.

— Ana Svetina, Head of Marketing, mStart d.o.o.

mStart Boosts Retail Customer Experience and Energy Efficiency by Gaining Real-Time Insight into 2,000 Stores

mStart is a Croatian provider of business and technological IT solutions oriented towards development, implementation, integration, and IT support for the agriculture, industrial, and retail sectors. mStart is a part of Agrokor Group—which operates more than 100 companies across several countries—and is the go-to point for all the group’s technology needs. The Agrokor Group is predominantly focused on the production and distribution of food, beverages, and retail products sold under the Konzum and Mercator brands, and among its top goals are reducing energy, water consumption, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Business Challenge

Improve service delivery for more than 1 million daily retail customers in five countries by providing faster and more detailed insight into shopping behaviors and needs
Reduce the costs and environmental impact of transporting retail goods to more than 2,000 stores by optimizing supply chain processes and inventory management

Enhance business agility and decision making by increasing the amount of data that can be rapidly processed and analyzed—for example in Slovenia, where there are 1 million loyalty cards issued, equivalent to one for every household, generating 70% of daily revenue
Provide a near real-time view of activities inside each store to enable rapid action to boost revenue and reduce waste—such as amending prices and promotions when particular goods are underselling
Help meet the groups’ environmental targets by implementing greener processes to reduce CO2 emissions and energy consumption

Increased business agility by deploying Oracle Big Data Appliance to provide near real-time, detailed insight—including for example the highest and lowest selling items—into the activities of more than 2,000 stores serving 1.2 million customers daily in five countries, enabling retail outlets to intelligently make same-day amendments to prices and promotions to boost revenue and optimize inventory management
Reduced retail transportation costs by using Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting and Oracle Retail Replenishment Optimization to enhance supply chain processes, and anticipated future transportation cost savings of 10% within 3 years by using Oracle Big Data Appliance to optimize inventory levels in near real time

Enabled mStart’s retail clients to increase revenue and enhance the experience of their loyalty program customers thanks to real-time data analysis—for example by identifying in-store customers who have just purchased wines and providing them immediately with information on the store’s current promotions of specialty cheeses via the loyalty mobile application
Achieved greener supply chain processes thanks to an end-to-end Oracle Retail solution for 1,000 business users—cutting CO2 emissions, reducing waste through stock optimization, and achieving energy savings for the entire Agrokor Group
Enhanced decision making thanks to Oracle Big Data Appliance’s ability to process considerably more data than legacy systems—enabling mStart to rapidly see and act upon correlations in customer shopping behavior, including unanticipated correlations which traditional data analysis models would not have identified
Increased cooperation with loyalty card program partner companies to offer more personalized retail services to customers, for example by identifying through the telecommunications partner that a customer is on holiday in a different country, and directing them to suitable store promotions in their current location
Achieved significant savings in hardware costs and manpower resources by deploying a ready-made engineered system for mStart’s big data solution—also achieving considerable reductions in energy consumption and helping towards the company’s sustainability goals
Minimized adverse environmental impacts by deploying a retail solution on a suite of energy-saving Oracle technologies—for example using Oracle VM to consolidate servers; Oracle Advanced Compression to lower storage requirements; and Oracle Real Application Clusters to save electricity, cooling, and floor space

We chose Oracle Big Data Appliance predominantly because of its seamless integration capabilities with the Oracle technologies that underpin our customers’ retail experience. Also, the environmental benefits of deploying an engineered system help us drive sustainability throughout the group.

— Ana Svetina, Head of Marketing, mStart d.o.o.

About mStart d.o.o.

Headquarters

Zagreb, Croatia

Employees

250

Annual Revenue

US$26 million

mStart d.o.o.

mStart was formed in 2010 when the Agrokor Group’s IT business was set up as a separate entity with the aim of optimizing IT investment, bringing new services to the competitive market, and reducing the group’s environmental impact through better use of technology. The Agrokor Group is the largest privately owned company in Croatia and one of the leading companies in Southeast Europe. Agrokor has established an Environmental Management System which is certified according to the requirements of the international ISO 14001:2004 standard.

Partners

mStart selected Oracle Platinum Partner Neos for its Oracle Big Data Appliance implementation.

“Neos consultants provided us with technical expertise for using big data in the retail industry, deployed the Oracle solution within the expected budget and timeframe, and continue to work with us on several use cases which will enable further reductions in transportation costs using unstructured data sources,” Svetina said.