Oracle announced that Italian hypermarket chain Bennet has deployed Oracle Retail Planning and Optimization solutions to increase efficiencies. Bennet operates 63 hypermarkets throughout northern Italy. Bennet focuses on price, service, and selection. With a centralized view of inventory, Bennet can leverage Oracle Retail Regular Price Optimization to maximize assortments to anticipate and meet customer needs.
Bennet understands that to stay competitive, it must adapt the price of its goods to react to changes in the market, including competitor pricing, seasonality and market trends. Its legacy system was time consuming and Bennet sought to improve the speed and the accuracy of the process to better serve its customers.
“We are committed to providing our customers with the very best quality and value, so it’s important that our prices match those of our competitors,” says Alessandro Volpato, Chief Information Officer, Bennet. “Our legacy system simply didn’t provide the ability to adapt our prices in real-time and we decided to replace our legacy technology with a proven, industry-leading platform.”
In 2015, Bennet turned to Oracle to transform its ability to manage pricing and improve its competitiveness while balancing profitability. The Italian hypermarket chain has dramatically cut the time it takes to adapt its prices following the implementation of Oracle Retail Merchandising Planning & Optimization—from days to hours. Bennet is now empowered to make real-time pricing decisions.
“Bennet has seen instant return on investment, as this activity can be completed in a few hours, and because the process of data entry is automated, it eliminates the possibility of errors associated with manual entry,” said Alessandro Volpato, Chief Information Officer, Bennet.
The first phase of the project was rolled out in July 2015 across Bennet’s full range of grocery items. Bennet focused on introducing rule-based pricing capabilities, including price proposal and competitor price comparison. The grocer is now extending the use of the Oracle platform with the optimization algorithms support. Using the Oracle platform, Bennet can dynamically manage pricing data without coding, and change pricing thresholds and rules without ever needing to involve the development team. Bennet can now predict the impact of pricing to both individual items and to categories of products, enabling it to balance and execute price effectiveness against competitors.
“Today, it’s never been easier to check and compare prices between different retailers, so it’s vital that they can adapt the price of items to react to their competitors, or to other factors,” said Ray Carlin, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Retail. “Customer loyalty is all about trust, and a big factor in maintaining this trust is making consumers feel that they are getting the best possible value. We look forward to working with Bennet to unlock even more of the value of our Merchandising platform, and help strengthen its brand and relationship with customers.”
The next phase of the implementation sees Bennet incorporating more sophisticated KPI within its operations and corporate strategy to simplify and drive the pricing decisions.