NRF: Italian grocer adopts Oracle retail planning tool

Grocery retailer Esselunga announced at NRF that it is using an Oracle Retail planning platform to make more profitable and competitive pricing decisions in its 138 supermarkets. The retailer, which last year achieved sales of 5.8 billion euros, has developed its pricing strategy using an Oracle Retail solution and can now predict the impact of pricing levels in each category, enabling the retailer to execute price repositioning to maximum effectiveness against competitors, while minimizing negative impacts on margin.

Esselunga was Italy's first supermarket chain and also the first to introduce online shopping and own-brand organic produce. With visibility to competitor pricing figures, Esselunga can now recalculate index pricing, simulate the effect of any changes and identify the optimal price for key items prior to executing the strategy.

Prior to implementing the Oracle Retail solution, this entire process used to take several weeks and Esselunga has succeeded in reducing time to market by more than 50 percent.

The decision to select Oracle Retail was driven by a need to provide the commercial, buying and marketing teams with an integrated source of information, incorporating current and historical sales, inventory and competitor pricing. The system uses this information to make recommendations on pricing opportunities to support decision-making.