The retail chain has extended the use of Oracle Retail Cloud to improve efficiencies and meet and price expectations of customers
Bengaluru: Founded by Enzo Ratti in 1964, the Italian supermarket chain Bennet operates over 63 supermarkets and superstores along with 55 operational Bennet drive collection points. It encompasses a combined sales area exceeding 290,000 sq. m. across Italy, according to the retailer’s official website.
The Italian grocery chain also owns over 50 shopping arcades and more than 1,350 internal shops of different product categories and employs over 7,000 people.
The need
Bennet realized the necessity to understand the correlation and connectivity of product selection, pricing, promotion, and placement to meet the needs and price expectations of customers.
To support Bennet’s rapid growth and to optimize inventory management and pricing strategy decisions to keep pace with customer demands, the retailer partnered with the database management system Oracle.
Developed by Oracle Corporation, an American multinational computer technology company established in 1977, the platform offers a fully integrated stack of cloud applications and cloud platform services.
The approach
Bennet was already using Oracle Retail Merchandising Planning and Optimization which enabled the grocer to cut the time it takes to adapt its prices from days down to hours.
In addition to the existing Oracle solutions, Bennet extended the use of Oracle Retail Cloud by adding Oracle Retail AI Foundation Cloud Service and Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Cloud Service.
Oracle Retail AI Foundation Cloud Service: This can be tuned to reflect a retailer’s business model and objectives. The solution’s core retail AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) power retail decision-making across planning, buying, moving, and selling teams. It also has the ability to orchestrate strategic retail decisions across teams with one consolidated, end-to-end view of retail data.
Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Cloud Service: This helps to align assortments using an end-to-end workflow, execute local market and microsite assortments, improve the conversion of traffic into higher sales/margins, and increase customer satisfaction. AI and automation help to provide an effective assortment strategy to maximize return on inventory investment.
The expected impact
“By extending our long-standing relationship with Oracle, we can continue to innovate using the Oracle retail cloud platform to streamline operational efficiently while increasing customer satisfaction,” said Adriano De Zordi, chief executive officer, Bennet.
The partnership is expected to leverage the power of AI to better inform pricing strategies that help move inventory. Applying AI to the Oracle Retail Data Store, Bennet can also adjust its inventory strategies and make real-time pricing decisions on individual items or categories of products.
“Oracle Retail AI Foundation will enable us to analyze historical performance, market trends, customer habits, the competitive landscape, and supplier capabilities, so we can price inventory more effectively,” said Fabrizio Greco, senior project manager, Bennet S.p.A.
