Retail Inventory Planning and Management

Oracle Retail AI Foundation

Leverage core retail AI and ML to make decisions on assortments, offers, inventory placement, forecasts, planning, buying, pricing, etc.

Forecasting engine

Provide an intelligent starting point for your planners to increase automation and accuracy.

Customer segmentation

Group customers based on attributes, behaviors, and transactions to tailor offers, pricing, and assortments.

Advanced clustering (PDF)

Cluster your stores based on traditional approaches of volume, square footage, and region, or leverage ML to cluster stores based on similar selling patterns.

Profile science

Determine the best size ratio for your buys by understanding the true demand of your sizes, considering stockouts.

Attribute extraction and binning

Extract item attributes from free-form descriptions, correcting short forms, misspellings, and other inconsistencies, and apply them to demand transference, customer decision trees, advanced clustering, and more.

Affinity analysis (PDF)

Determine how items interact with each other for an effective promotional strategy within your financial planning process.

Innovation workbench

Leverage open source along with your data science team to create your own AI and ML models.

Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning improves plan accuracy

Increase profits

Identify opportunities for more profitable inventory investments while ensuring day-to-day decisions align with business objectives. Support proactive retail management, resulting in fewer lost sales, excessive markdowns, and unprofitable exit strategies.

Integrated forecasting

Base plans on accurate demand forecasts, rather than focusing on sales history. Eliminate plan discrepancies and organizational silos with reconciled plan visibility into all departments.

Improved accuracy

Provide views into sales history, actualized weekly sales, and unconstrained forecasts to support better, more accurate planning.

Increased return on investment

Enable receipt flow planning down to the weekly level to maximize return on inventory investment and align promotional activities with strategic goals by geography, class, category, and selling channel.

Reduced markdowns

Ensure that bottom-up item plans reconcile with top-down financial plans, preventing overstocks.

Oracle Retail Assortment Planning helps meet demand

Plan assortments with ease

Align assortments using a highly visual, end-to-end workflow. Define and execute local market and microsite assortments, improve conversion of traffic into higher sales/margins, and increase customer satisfaction.

Optimize assortment strategy and creation

AI and automation help to provide an effective assortment strategy to maximize return on inventory investment. By factoring in assortment trends or attribute mix from last year, style-color performance by location, and one-off and special buys, get a recommended rate of sale and target options as a benchmark for merchants and planners.

React to in-season trends and opportunities

The in-season business process provides planners with the ability to react quickly and effectively to season-to-date actuals and trends with exception management. With one version of the truth, a common business process, and calculations with smart starting points, planners can easily review and update sales, promotions, and markdown plans.

Oracle Retail Category Management

Maximize performance and increase customer satisfaction

Consolidate multiple data sources into an easy-to-consume format, gaining actionable insights and recommendations to drive customer-centric and targeted assortments.

One version of the truth

Recommend formal category roles, strategies, and tactics based on consumer insights and product performance for use in downstream assortment, pricing, promotion, inventory, and space processes.

Review and analyze preseason and in-season category performance

Monitor performance and validate key initiatives are tracking as planned with scorecards related to promotions, private label products, and inventory.

Key benefits

• Provide a fact-based smart starting point, enabling you to refine inventory based on category/store base knowledge.
• Integrate and align category and assortment decisions with financial and space targets/constraints.
• Leverage retail AI inputs, exclusively available via Oracle Cloud.
• Enable a 360-degree view of the market, customers, competitors, and vendors.

Oracle Retail Assortment and Space Optimization maximizes product placement

Optimize return on space

Optimize assortments to available space to maximize planogram performance, return on space, sales, revenue, and profits.

Drive profit and remain flexible to the changing retail environment

Optimize assortments to store- and cluster-specific needs to maximize return on space, sales, and gross profit while maintaining visual merchandising standards and supply chain considerations.

Improve customer satisfaction

Optimize assortment and placement for the available space for each store to improve customer satisfaction.

Turn data into value

• Conduct macro-space optimization what-if analysis to maximize profits.
• Create assortment and facing recommendations while balancing supply chain constraints, business rules, and visual merchandising standards.
• Leverage fixture data to dynamically create store and space clusters.
• Use item-level demand transference in calculations to create optimal assortment mix.

Oracle Retail Macro Space Optimization

Optimize available floor space

Dynamic recommendations enable you to allocate optimal space to departments, categories, and subcategories or planograms while maximizing overall sales and profit.

Dynamic actionable recommendations

• Assess and optimize space in multiple ways: store group, store, a department/area within a store, or a specific aisle.
• Determine the amount of allocated space required to align with upstream financial targets.
• Identify key areas to allocate/reallocate store space, improving profitability.
• Integrate with merchandise planning and floor planning business processes.
• Leverage what-if capabilities to evaluate the real-time impact of adding or removing space.