REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Aug. 11,
2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The global health crisis has
created an inventory emergency for many retailers. Today's
unpredictable and volatile customer buying habits are limiting the
effectiveness of using historical data to predict purchasing
behavior and plan product inventory accordingly. Powered by machine
learning, the new Oracle Retail Inventory Optimization Cloud
Service can sit between a retailer's forecasting and supply chain
systems to help highlight the next best actions they can take to
optimize inventory. This helps retailers get to answers on
inventory placement and volume faster so they can better serve
customers while maintaining a healthy cash position.
"Retailers are struggling to adjust decades of well-defined
inventory and traditional supply chain management processes that
have been thrown a curveball by COVID-19," said Jeff Warren, Oracle Retail vice president of
strategy and solution management. "With the ability to be deployed
in just weeks, Oracle Retail Inventory Optimization Cloud Service
does the heavy lifting and modeling to rebalance and optimize
inventory so retailers can invest in the right products and
automatically adapt to new consumer patterns as they
occur."
In today's climate, the ability to respond to changing customer
demands as quickly as possible is critical. Oracle Retail Inventory
Optimization Cloud Service comes with pre-built machine learning
models that more accurately predict overall inventory levels;
recommend inventory re-distribution; balance supply and demand to
free up money tied up in excess inventory; and more.
The cloud service easily integrates with existing forecasting
and supply chain solutions and can be deployed quickly to reduce
the burden on a retailer's IT and development teams.
Making Inventory Work
Consumer habits in recent months have been anything but typical
as shortages spurred the need for people to try new brands or
stores, and the desire to go out less has led to fewer shopping
trips, but often larger overall grocery purchases. As a result,
inventory moves out of the stores faster, creating a strain on both
the supply chain and its financial model, leading to a gross margin
problem.
For example, an average grocery retailer, with 30,000 SKUs and
at least 1,000 stores, will have millions of SKU-store
combinations. Determining the optimal replenishment plan when
things are changing so rapidly is almost impossible without the
help of purpose-built, machine learning models.
With Oracle Retail Inventory Optimization Cloud Service
retailers can simulate and forecast optimal inventory positions and
parameters to eliminate trial-and-error. As a result, supply chain
executives and chief financial officers can come together to
navigate tricky terrain, manage cash flow, and determine the impact
of inventory on the balance sheet. The autonomous solution
self-learns and automatically tunes to optimize working capital and
deliver fast value by:
- Performing continuous optimization of replenishment
parameters;
- Informing replenishment strategies with service-to-inventory
trade-offs;
- Translating objectives into machine learning-driven
replenishment policies down to the item-location;
- Recommending inventory re-distribution to serve customers and
avoid markdowns;
- Enriching the inventory movement processes with time-phased
inventory projections;
- Helping increase employee productivity to maximize a
constrained workforce; and
- Interacting with Oracle Retail Offer Optimization to drive
better outcomes through simultaneous manipulation of supply and
demand.
The cloud service is generally available today. To learn more or
request a demo, visit:
https://www.oracle.com/industries/retail/products/supply-chain/inventory-optimization
About Oracle Retail
Oracle is the modern platform for retail. Oracle provides
retailers with a complete, open, and integrated platform for
best-of-breed business applications, cloud services, and hardware
that are engineered to work together. Leading fashion, grocery, and
specialty retailers use Oracle solutions to accelerate from best
practice to next practice, drive operational agility, and refine
the customer experience. For more information, visit our website,
www.oracle.com/retail.
About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated
applications for Sales, Service, Marketing, Human Resources,
Finance, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, plus Highly Automated and
Secure Oracle Cloud Infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous
Database. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please
visit us at www.oracle.com.
Trademarks
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.
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SOURCE Oracle