Coldwater Creek Moves To Improve Online And Store Performance With Oracle Retail Planning And Optimization

Retailer Implements Oracle in Nine Months to Enhance Customer Experience and Optimize Assortment

Coldwater Creek, a leading specialty retailer of women’s apparel, jewelry, gifts and accessories, has implemented Oracle Retail merchandise financial planning, assortment planning and item planning solutions to help reduce aged inventory and increase full-price selling, improving the productivity and profitability of store, online and catalog channels. Using Oracle, Coldwater Creek looks to increase its margins by ensuring that popular items are consistently in stock while using promotional tools to clear aged inventory.

“The new Oracle-based inventory planning system provides inventory visibility that simply was not possible for us in the past,” said Jim Bell, Executive Vice President and CFO/COO, Coldwater Creek. “Ultimately, this should lead to further reductions in aged inventory and allow us to increase our full-price selling, making us more productive and profitable.”

Coldwater Creek deployed Oracle Retail Merchandise Planning and Optimization solutions as part of a strategic initiative to reduce inventory while ensuring the right styles and colors are available to meet customer demand in stores, online and via catalog.The Oracle Retail solutions provide Coldwater Creek the ability to create both pre-season and in-season plans to deliver immediate, color-level performance detail across all sales channels.

“The new planning process underpins one of our strategic business objectives for this year, which is to optimize the effectiveness of our inventory investments without diminishing our ability to meet customer demand, across all channels,” said Deanna Emsley, Senior Vice President of Inventory Planning and Corporate Strategy, Coldwater Creek.  “The Oracle Retail solution represents a significant change in the way we approach assortments and inventory by facilitating a ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approach to planning.”

With this level of cross channel and cross category collaboration, Coldwater Creek is better able to tailor and monetize its product assortments and respond more effectively to evolving customer demand.

Coldwater Creek is using Oracle solutions to budget and forecast demand more accurately, allowing it to make better buying decisions, and react quickly to how well an item is selling by either purchasing more or using promotional mechanisms to strategically clear merchandise faster.

Coldwater Creek expects the integrated inventory management and planning processes to improve the productivity and profitability of store, online and catalog channels.

Relying on an internal team of merchandising and IT experts supplemented by minimal external consulting, Coldwater Creek implemented the suite of integrated of Oracle Retail applications in just nine months.

“Assortment and inventory levers shape the customer experience as well as margins for the season,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail. “Coldwater Creek is using Oracle Retail to transform critical processes to get closer to the customer and ultimately drive store and online performance.”