Close to 220 retail executives gathered in Washington DC last week for Oracle Retail’s annual Crosstalk event, which was the largest attendance in the history of the conference, according to Rose Spicer, Senior Director, Retail Marketing for Oracle Retail. A total of 97 retail companies were represented, Spicer said. In addition to its annual user group meeting, which drew approximately 100 attendees, Crosstalk offered 39 retailer-led presentations throughout the three-day event, up from 29 the previous year.
The opening keynote was presented by Johnny Belk, President and COO of Belk, the southern U.S. department store chain operating 305 stores in 16 states. In 2011, Belk sales grew 5% to $3.5 billion. During the next three years the company is investing $150 million to repair and rebuild its core information systems and technology, including merchandising applications, a new data warehouse, new POS and a new eCommerce platform.
Seven retail sessions were led by retail customers of ATG, a recent Oracle acquisition. Notably, John Thompson, SVP and General Manager from BestBuy.com led the closing keynote session. Other notable retail sessions featured Morrison’s, Stein Mart, Scheels’s Sporting Goods, Reitman’s and Chico’s FAS.
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Additionally, more than 50 retail attendees also had the opportunity to attend two store tours, at Best Buy and Chicos.
Customer Wins From Belk, Skechers, Unicomer And Ashford.com
As part of the Crosstalk event, Oracle Retail unveiled three recent customer wins.
Belk has selected Oracle Retail Merchandising System. “We are enabling next generation best practices that will center on optimizing the customer experience at both the store and ecommerce level,” said Mike Laurenti, CIO and Executive Vice President, Belk. Belk expects to use the Oracle Retail applications to develop next generation practices across its core merchandising operations, creating a foundation that will allow the business to better sense and respond to customer demand through improvements in allocation and replenishment.
Skechers U.S.A. Inc. has upgraded and expanded its Oracle® Applications investment, implemented Oracle Database and moved to Oracle On Demand, Oracle’s premier cloud service to support rapid growth across its retail and wholesale channels. The new business information systems are part of a larger initiative for the billion-dollar-plus footwear company to fuel growth, reduce total cost of ownership and enable the business to respond faster to market opportunities. “As we manage growth, we are establishing a business structure that lowers costs and creates more value and flexibility across the business,” said Mark Bravo, Senior Vice President of Finance, Skechers.
“By moving all of our applications to a standard technology platform, we achieve several goals. We are now able to focus on our core business of delivering solutions to improve processes and provide accurate information and let the technology experts manage the technology issues,” said Mainak Sarkar, Director, Financial Systems, Skechers. With more than 3,000 styles of shoes to design, develop and market, Skechers upgraded to Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management and PeopleSoft Supply Chain Management to increase operational efficiencies and improve controls by establishing an integrated, industry-specific platform.
An Oracle customer since 1997, Skechers also implemented PeopleSoft Enterprise Real Estate Management and Oracle Fusion Governance, Risk, and Compliance applications. The company also implemented Oracle Financial Analytics, a pre-built Oracle Business Intelligence Application and PeopleSoft Enterprise Project Costing and PeopleSoft Enterpri! se Contracts to develop a custom Royalty Management dashboard, providing managers with better financial visibility to the company’s licensing contracts.
Grupo Unicomer, a consumer electronics, appliances and furniture retailer serving Latin America, Central America, the Caribbean and U.S. markets, has selected Oracle Retail Stores Solutions to support its growth in international markets. Unicomer will use the Oracle offerings, including Oracle Retail Point-of-Service, Oracle Retail Back Office and Oracle Retail Central Office, to provide a consistent customer experience and faster checkout times across its chain of retail stores in 18 countries across Central America and the Caribbean. “The Oracle offerings will help us to improve the customer experience and performance of all of our stores, as well as enable us to open stores more readily and respond faster to new market opportunities,” said Guillermo Siman, Vice Chairman and Executive Vice President, Grupo Unicomer.
Ashford.com, a luxury watch and jewelry retailer is using the Oracle ATG Web Commerce platform to personalize offers and launch a members-only shopping club called “The Vault.” Ashford.com implemented ATG Web Commerce more than 18 months ago as part of an initiative to better manage product catalogs, improve the shopping experience and establish a more robust ecommerce engine. “ATG has been a strong platform for managing our site and product catalog and we are thrilled to take its capabilities — and the offers and services we offer our customers — to the next level,” said Joel Katz, Ashford’s COO. Since going live on the ATG Web Commerce platform, Ashford.com’s online sales have grown rapidly, and year to date are more than double last year’s sales during the same period.
