About CrossTalk
Last week Oracle Retail organized its annual CrossTalk event in Dallas, Texas, bringing together retailers to share experiences, updates and news across the ecosystem. The event was face to face, which was a welcome but new experience after two years of zoom conferences. With attendance at pleasantly high levels and information sharing delivered in person, it is safe to say all attendees had plenty of opportunity to meet, network, exchange updates and learn about experiences made, updates announced and a general sense of business in the current economic climate affecting retail.
State of retail
Generally speaking the retail industry continues to face challenges, right now mostly driven by high inflation, dampening consumer demand with couple notable exceptions: hospitality and travel. Of all retailers at the event, there were three distinct groups in terms of current business performance: doing well, these are travel and hospitality related retailers, often in the luxury sector, who are currently seeing high demand, strong revenue and margins. However, they already see a slowing demand forecasted as summer holiday travel period ends in couple of months. The second group of retailers sell essentials like food and gas, they see an increasing focus on price from customers, concentrating on cheaper options wherever possible, to save money for pent up travel. This means revenue and margin is slightly decreased and lower cost alternatives are in preference by consumers. The third group of retailers, typically selling discretionary goods not related to hospitality and travel, have seen an significant decrease in revenue and margins, with consumers saving for travel and high gas prices that also affect cost of food.
Focus areas
In terms of focus, retailers have reported to concentrate on two general areas of business: optimizing existing supply chain and inventory, and seamless execution of omnichannel trade. When retailers have seen high demand late last year and faced supply chain issues, a high level of stock has been ordered in at high cost, with the assumption that high demand will clear the stock even at higher prices. However, with decreasing demand due to above mentioned factors, high stock level (with a high cost of goods) is beginning to weigh on retailers’ balance sheets, cannibalizing space from fall holiday items. To help clear inventory, inventory and price optimization solutions are in high demand. On the online versus in store front, omnichannel retailing has remained a must after the pandemic lockdowns for any retailer with stores. To implement processes and high fidelity and up to date data, modern merchandising systems are in high demand. For both solution sets SAAS is clearly a preference due to its speed to value (quick to implement), efficiency in terms of not requiring big internal tech teams to run and future proof functionality due to the perpetual updates delivered by Oracle, including not only functional updates but integration and extensibility changes that make the adoption and integration of SAAS solutions far easier than earlier.
Conclusion
In conclusion it is safe to say that despite ongoing challenges, the retail sector is very much alive. By sharing learnings and experience across the community, retailers create actionable value in the ecosystem that Quickborn is proud to be a part of.
About Quickborn Consulting LLC
Quickborn is a diverse team of experts, passionate about solving problems in the retail industry. We implement next practice capabilities that drive our retailer clients to outperform their competitors. We focus on raising customer satisfaction and increasing operational efficiency across all channels of trade. For more information, visit our website: www.www.qbcs.com.
About Oracle Retail
Oracle is the modern platform for retail. Oracle provides retailers with a complete, open, and integrated platform for best-of-breed business applications, cloud services, and hardware that are engineered to work together. Leading fashion, grocery, and specialty retailers use Oracle solutions to accelerate from best practice to next practice, drive operational agility, and refine the customer experience. For more information, visit their website: www.oracle.com/retail.
About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated applications for Sales, Service, Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Supply Chain, and Manufacturing, plus Highly Automated and Secure Oracle Cloud Infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous Database. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit www.oracle.com.
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