ORACLE CORPORATION 
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News Facts
* New Look, one of the UK's leading fashion retailers, has implemented
Oracle(R) SOA Suite to help increase operational flexibility and
strengthen its foundation for future growth as it expands
internationally.
* The success of the project secured New Look the 'Back Office Solution
of the Year Award' at the recent Retail Systems Awards. Now in their
third year, the Retail Systems Awards recognize excellence and
innovation in IT within the UK retail sector.
* With more than 600 stores across Europe and 15 franchise stores in the
Middle East, New Look has also recently opened an online channel, which
is already receiving half a million visitors a week.
* New Look implemented Oracle SOA Suite to leverage existing and future
IT investments and help accelerate business performance by
reengineering processes within its Buying and Merchandising (B&M)
function, initially focused on markdown management and purchase
ordering.
* As one of the first retailers globally to deploy SOA to achieve process
excellence, New Look has championed a business-led approach, in
contrast to other organisations adopting a technology or integration
approach. By focusing on the business objectives, SOA has quickly
gained momentum across New Look's trading floor.
* A core team of senior business users within the IT and B&M teams,
Oracle and Accenture, supported by group directors as business
sponsors, helped ensure that New Look's project remained focused on the
business.
Rapid Deployment and Results
* To date, New Look has completed two of the four-phase SOA programme,
which commenced in June 2007. Both markdown and purchase order (PO)
projects have delivered real-time savings to the B&M teams and
considerable strategic benefits have been realized across the business
from the integration and expansion of new channels and markets.
* SOA's visibility and control has helped improved the accuracy of
40 million SKU store records updated by the markdown application and
3000 POs raised each week. This has helped eliminate costly errors,
ensure markdown cost and expenses to margin are properly assigned, and
reduce lead-time through suppliers getting orders up to a week earlier.
* The markdown solution has enabled a common process to be adopted across
the UK and International stores for the first time enabling the total
impact of markdown decisions to be measured.
* The PO solution has allowed New Look to introduce franchise specific
POs in order to help ensure that the franchise channels have guaranteed
stock, clear visibility of commitment and now, with the introduction of
upstream hubs, SOA has enabled direct deliveries bypassing the UK. This
alone has helped reduce three weeks of lead-time to franchise markets,
with the associated handling and freight savings.
* The final stages of the project are expected to go live in January and
April 2009 delivering a consistent markdown optimization solution
across the trading floor and enabling complex POs to be raised
reflecting the various supply chain routings required to support New
Look's expanding franchise operations.
Supporting Quote
* "SOA has been a huge success within New Look and investing early in
this emerging technology has created real value. Oracle SOA Suite has
enabled us to focus on processes and the way we work, stripping
significant non-value effort from the buying and merchandising teams,
which in turn, has enabled them to focus on growing the business. More
importantly, SOA has helped us create a flexible platform for
supporting our strategic expansion," said Carl McPhail, CEO, New Look.
Supporting Resources
* About New Look (http://www.newlook.co.uk/)
* Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture
(http://www.oracle.com/technologies/soa/index.html)
* Oracle in Retail (http://www.oracle.com/retail)About Oracle Retail
Oracle is the number one provider of innovative and comprehensive industry software solutions for retailers -- enabling organizations to serve their customers better by applying insight into daily business decisions for more profitable results. With software that provides supply chain, operations, merchandising, store systems, optimization as well as enterprise applications and infrastructure software, Oracle partners with the world's leading retail companies, including 20 of the 20 top retailers worldwide, to transform the economics of their businesses.
About Oracle
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.
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SOURCE Oracle
