First Retail Software Company Delivers New Solution to Help Global Retailers Enhance Operational Excellence and Collaborate More Effectively with Suppliers

Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Product Information Management for Retail, an innovative master data management application that allows global retailers to create a single, enterprise view of all product information to help unlock value from within the business. Oracle Product Information Management for Retail helps retailers improve operational efficiencies, accelerate the speed-to-market of new product introductions and service offerings across different channels, improve customer intimacy and automate collaboration with trading partners.

As the industry continues to experience a dramatic transformation and the channels of retailing expand, retailers are being forced to devote significant time and resources to addressing data quality issues. These efforts are cutting into their profits and negatively impacting the bottom line as a result of factors such as wasted labor and lost productivity. Making matters worse, ignoring the data quality problem is not an option as it can lead directly to missed sales, lost market share and customer dissatisfaction when products are unavailable or slow to reach the shelf.

Oracle Product Information Management for Retail integrates, standardizes and synchronizes fragmented product data from multiple systems into a single, central data repository. As a result, the solution is able to deliver a trusted source of product information. This is especially useful for retailers with multiple item masters, multiple sales channels or those who require data synchronization with suppliers. Retail mandates around the use of Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) standards have proven to be catalysts for many retail product information initiatives. Key features of Oracle Product Information Management for Retail include:

* New Product Induction and Product Synchronization: enables retailers to synchronize product information with information from their suppliers to help reduce errors and improve overall data quality

* Automated Syndication through GDSN: out-of-the-box certified solution for GDSN and 1Sync data pool

* Collaborative Processes: allows the extended retail enterprise and third parties to be involved in the product setup process

* Flexible Attributes and Content Management: helps retailers maintain all of the various attributes that products have across different channels within a single system

* Flexible Configuration: allows the user experience to be tailored to user roles and provides for a streamlined, secure process

* Unstructured Data Management: maintains information from various formats in the same repository and automates integration of data and services between internal applications to help ensure data integrity

* Broad Data Quality Tools: maintains a clean, accurate single source of the truth

* Open-standards based integration architecture: distributes accurate information to the extended enterprise