Insight-Driven Retailing Blog

Veteran industry analyst Scott Langdoc has a new analyst gig. He has launched retailCENTRIC, a consulting and advisory firm that combines the Web 2.0 features of blogs and social networking with the fact-based market analysis of traditional analyst firms. retailCENTRIC seeks to differentiate itself from the traditional analyst firms with its lower-cost advisory and consultancy services, faster delivery of research and analysis, and free research. One of the first pieces of free research is Scott's note on Oracle Retail's new Fashion Planning Bundle titled "Oracle Puts Their R13 Focus on Fashion."

Obviously when a company like Oracle buys several best-of-breed companies, the first tasks are to standardize the technology platform and integrate the assets. After all, that's what retailers used to do themselves. With those efforts behind us for the most part, we're now focused on better enabling industry segment-specific processes. The Fashion Bundle represents the first retail segment to be addressed, with others planned for the near future.

The Fashion Bundle integrates, configures, and enables the business processes that fashion retailers require to excel, all while minimizing implementation costs and generally lowering TCO. Tying fashion planning to execution has five key attributes:

1. Plans seamlessly drive execution
2. Execution reality influences planning
3. Retail science informs and automates
4. Exception-driven, role-based workflow
5. Real-time information updates

The Fashion Bundle includes Merchandise Financial Planning, Assortment Planning, Size Profile Optimization, Item Planning, Clearance Optimization, Markdown Optimization, and Demand Forecasting, but not all are required. There are separate solutions containing subsets of the products, so the retailer can focus on a particular area such as assortment planning or markdowns.

So far the response has been great, and we plan to continue enhancing the bundle as we receive further feedback from customers.