Office Depot has been adding business and IT services to its offerings through acquisitions, including BizBox and CompuCom. The retailer also has made changes to its underlying IT infrastructure that will help it manage a more complex business.
The 1,500-store retailer has selected Oracle Cloud Applications to support supply chain, human resources and financial functions. Office Depot selected Oracle in August 2017, and will go live with specific applications beginning in February 2018.
“Office Depot is pivoting away from being a traditional office products retailer to a broader omnichannel services and products company and that causes a lot of complexity given our existing technology,” said Damon Venger, Senior Director of IT Applications, Office Depot.
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The move already has helped Office Depot improve its business agility. “The initial purchase decision was made in August, before the CompuCom acquisition,” said Venger in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “However, by the end of the year, it helped us enable a completely new piece of business. We were able to stand up a subscription service model in the cloud in 90 days, which is not something that originally had been planned.”
The cloud solutions replace a number of legacy applications that were proving “costly to run and operate, in terms of purchasing new hardware, major upgrades and customizations,” said Venger. “When you’re on legacy technology, you’re not growing with the changes in business and the economy. This now gets us into a platform where Oracle is doing that for us. They are building functionality we don’t even know we need yet, but when we do it will be there.”
The Oracle applications include:
• Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud, to support high order volumes and a large range of products, and to help get products to market faster and offer real-time insight into day-to-day logistics, procurement and forecasting;
• Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud, providing actionable data for Office Depot to manage its global workforce while eliminating disjointed point solutions; and
• Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud, to help transform finance functions from planning to financial close, enabling timely and accurate reporting and lowering IT complexity.
