Sportmaster is using Oracle Retail applications to enhance planning and forecasting capabilities to support rapid growth in the sports and casual clothing market.

The Group operates more than 400 stores under the Sportmaster and O’Stin brands; offering a range of world-renowned products for sports, outdoor activities and recreation in more than 130 cities.

Sportmaster had a growing need to adopt a business model that will enable the company to become more flexible and accurate in predicting and meeting consumer demands and expectations for its brands and collections.

The selection of Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning and Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting helps Sportmaster to redefine and optimize planning and forecasting processes and integrate them into a common workflow, which is considered to be key for driving efficiency throughout the business.

A common defined set of best practices that delivers consistent and accurate information to the business have replaced legacy applications, automated manual processes and reduced planning discrepancies and disparate sources of data.

Providing Sportmaster with complete visibility of plans and the tracking of associated processes in a fully integrated workflow, Oracle Retail applications help to manage merchandise from pre-season planning of sales, margin and inventory investments to in-season management and clearance of merchandise.

The creation of high-level plans that meet strategic business objectives help Sportmaster to optimise forecasting, merchandise and financial planning to support its long-term growth, along with low-level detailed plans focused on category, brand or store.

Additional benefits include the creation of a merchandise hierarchy to correspond with the layout of each store, supporting Sportmaster’s goal to plan by collection; and the ability to reconcile top-down and bottom-up planning throughout the organisation.

Sportmaster became an Oracle customer for the first time in 2008 when the Company turned to Oracle for scalable, integrated retail functionality and proven best practice to help it achieve its long-term strategies.

Sportmaster has completed the first phase of implementation with Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning and go-live is in progress for Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting.

The second phase of the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning project is underway now in Sportmaster and O’Stin.

Supporting Quotes

“In order to grow our business, we need to offer our customers the best range of quality goods for sports and recreation at the optimum level of service,” said Konstantin Popkov, Planning and Controlling Director, Sportmaster. “Oracle Retail provides us with a common planning platform that delivers a consolidated view of performance across our businesses and helps ensure the best and most consistent choice and service to our customers.”

“Oracle is committed to support Sportmaster and help the decision-makers to turn accurate information into insightful business decisions that bring benefit to the entire organisation,” said Duncan Angove, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Retail. “The integrated capabilities of the Oracle Retail applications will help Sportmaster maintain its focus on long-term growth and market leadership.”