Retailers’ guide to Oracle Retail MFP Cloud Service

As small retailers (<100 million USD annual revenue) grow, they face more and more challenges in financial planning process including: 

  • More users need to access and update the same plan, making version control difficult.
  • Excel formulas can be accidentally overwritten, causing calculation mistakes.
  • Lack of automatic data aggregation and spreading across different planning levels, impacting data accuracy and consistency.
  • Changing process or planning level requires an extensive amount of manual work which is prone to errors.
  • Including additional channels, store formats, currencies and geographical areas also need a lengthy, manual effort.
  • Auditing plan modifications and implementing role-level data security is practically impossible.
  • Leveraging data analytics is a challenge, hence retailer lags behind in terms of reacting to market changes.
  • Solution not scalable and not functionally diverse enough to match business growth.
  • Solution security is compromised.
 

Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service (MFP CS) is the perfect answer to all these challenges for growing retailers. Cloud native and based on industry best practices, Oracle Retail MFP CS provides a unique platform for your entire planning team to follow the unified, streamlined process in a completely secured environment. It is highly scalable, easily adaptable, and also functionally feature-rich to support the unique needs of your business. Equipped by the forecasting engine and AI capabilities that is included in the package, retailers can easily optimize their sales and inventory performance, as well as increasing agility facing the ever-changing consumer demands and retail environment.

Oracle Retail MFP CS is a comprehensive solution designed to help retailers effectively manage their merchandise financial plans. It allows management to set strategic merchandise and financial targets for multiple channels, formats, and geographical areas, and planners to create detailed financial and unit plans to support the corporate’s goals.

Key features include:
  • Quick activation with subscription model.
  • Best practice driven solution operating on a proven, globally scalable planning platform.
  • Pre-Season and In-Season Planning from strategic down to subclass/location level.
  • Available in Retail and Cost accounting methods.
  • Facilitates alignment between planning levels through streamlined reconciliation and approval process.
  • Supports multi-currency, multi-geography planning in multiple languages.
  • Real-time planning strategy simulation and evaluation.
  • Cross-channel returns planning and customer journey planning.
  • Omni-channel planning complemented by channel-specific metrics for Brick & Mortar, direct selling, and wholesale/franchise.
  • Exception based management.
  • Native integration with Oracle Retail Forecasting Engine and AI Foundation modules:
  1. Customer Segmentation – Customer grouping based on attributes, behaviors and transactions to tailor pricing and assortment offers accordingly.
  2. Advanced Clustering – Cluster stores based on volume, square footage, region, etc., or selling patterns identified by machine learning.
  3. Profile Science – Determination of best size ratio considering stock-outs.
  4. Attribute Extraction & Binning – Item attribute extraction from free-form, inconsistent, incomplete data set and application to other analytics modules.
  5. Customer Decision Trees – Development of attribute-based alternative hierarchies based on customer shopping behavior.
  6. Demand Transference – Understanding of the incremental revenue each item brings to determine the optimal assortment.
  7. Affinity Analysis – Piloting of a more effective promotional strategy by comprehending the interaction between items.
  8. Innovation Workbench – Create your own AI/ML models with the language of your choice by leveraging open source along with your data science team.
Extensible with
  • Oracle Retail Home – Role-based, exception-based single access point to all Oracle Retail solutions that provides high-level insights and capability of drilling into problematic areas as needed.
  • Oracle Analytics – Comprehensive platform which leverages data from Oracle Retail AI Foundation to provide business insights that suit business users, power users, and data scientists.
  • Oracle Application Express (APEX) – Low-code development platform which allows retailers to quickly build and deploy scalable and secure enterprise apps.
  • Oracle REST Data Services – Bridges HTTPS and your Oracle database, providing a REST API, SQL Developer Web, a PL/SQL Gateway, SODA for REST, and the ability to publish RESTful Web Services for interacting with the data and stored procedures in your Oracle database.
  • Oracle Machine Learning – Supports data exploration, preparation, and machine learning modeling at scale using SQL, R, Python, REST, AutoML, and no-code interfaces, by simplifying and automating key elements of the machine learning lifecycle.

Paired with Oracle Retail AI Foundation Cloud Service, Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service utilizes extensible analytics and AI to drive optimal planning decisions. Key benefits include: 

  • Accurate and future-proofed plans based on integrated demand forecasting.
  • Improved gross margin and reduced markdowns by proactively reducing lost sales, over-stock, excessive markdowns, and unprofitable exit strategies.
  • Globally scalable solution while remaining configurable to include enhancements and upgrades to support market changes.
  • Increased Return on Investment (ROI) and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

If you want to improve your financial planning process or are interested in the Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service, contact us today to get a free consultation!

Quickborn Consulting is Oracle Retail’s gold partner, as well as a certified expert in implementing Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service. We have a strong track record of successful implementations and in helping retailers optimizing their financial planning processes. With our specialized knowledge and experience, Quickborn Consulting provides valuable insights and guidance to retailers considering the Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service. 

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