ORCL: Oracle Announces Oracle Retail Promotion Planning and Optimization

Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle(r) Retail Promotion Planning and Optimization, an innovative application that helps retail organizations better understand the drivers of customer demand and the effectiveness of past promotion events to help improve gross margins. Based on powerful data mining technology, Oracle Retail Promotion Planning and Optimization is the first retail application that combines planning, forecasting and analytics to provide promotional intelligence for driving higher returns on advertising and inventory investments.

During benchmarking studies, Oracle Retail Promotion Planning and Optimization has consistently demonstrated 5 to 15 percent improvements in promotional gross margin. The application creates a centralized process to help select categories and items to promote, determine best price and promotional offer, and provide a promotional forecast for the event at the location level. In the case of one specialty retailer, simply identifying and removing all the offers that had a negative gross margin impact on previous promotions yielded a 7 percent increase in gross margin with no loss of sales.

Oracle Retail Promotion Planning and Optimization helps retail businesses improve the customer shopping experience by predicting how much to buy and how much inventory is needed at each store to support a planned promotion. Leveraging the proven analytical capabilities from Oracle Retail Price Optimization, the application determines the optimal offer and price for retailers to make their financial targets. The product also features a slick graphical user interface that simplifies the promotion planning process and contains a centralized calendar view that in addition to supporting product images can effectively serve as the official source for all promotional events across multiple advertising channels.

In a recent report titled 'Retail Shines at Oracle OpenWorld,' AMR Research says that "new promotions management functionality was demonstrated, garnering strong attention from retail and consumer goods companies at the conference." The report goes on to say that AMR expects "interest in promotions management to ratchet up quickly in 2007 as a result of improved software from Oracle and others to address this often complex but critical business practice."

"Retail organizations invest a tremendous amount of money each year in advertising and promotional events," said Duncan Angove, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Retail. "Oracle Retail Promotion Planning and Optimization allows retailers to run 'what if' scenarios that evaluate promotional strategies to more effectively predict their potential success and maximize investment dollars. Applying science to the art of promotions can have a profound positive effect on the economics of a retail business."


About Oracle Retail
Oracle is the number one provider of innovative and comprehensive industry software solutions for retailers - enabling organizations to serve their customers better by applying insight into daily business decisions for more profitable results. With software that provides supply chain, operations, merchandising, store systems, optimization and information technology solutions, Oracle partners with the world's leading retail companies, including 17 of the top 20 retailers worldwide, to transform the economics of their businesses.