Oracle Helps Comms Providers Intelligently Launch New Services

Customers today simply expect more from their communications service providers (CSPs). Instead of buying expensive broad scale offerings, customers want CSPs to propose services, devices, plans and pricing that best meet their unique lifestyle or business needs.

To meet this demand, Oracle has developed the Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications, as part of the Oracle Digital Experience for Communications solution. Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications empowers CSPs to easily launch new service offers and tailor them to specific customer micro-segments to improve engagement. By providing a common and consistent definition of product information, Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications helps CSPs simplify and streamline offer introduction across sales, ecommerce, ordering, fulfillment and billing.

For example, a CSP can quickly launch a compelling new digital content offer – one that might include music, video, 5G and an IoT-based digital assistant – by easily configuring its pricing, discounts and promotions for  various channels and fulfillment paths– all from one central platform. 

“At Oracle, data is simply part of our DNA,” said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager, Oracle CX Cloud. “We use the industry’s richest dataset available to accurately anticipate customer needs, then leverage this in our innovative CX cloud applications like Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications. This enables CSPs to rapidly design and launch compelling AI-recommended offers that target the right customers, in just the right way, and at just the right time to maximize uptake, revenue, customer satisfaction and loyalty.”

A New Era of Tailored Communications Services

Expected to be generally available in Oracle’s fiscal year 2020, Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications enables CSPs to rapidly create offer bundles of existing products, commercial terms and conditions, as well as the creation of completely new product offerings.

As part of the Oracle Digital Experience for Communications solution, Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications gives service providers in communications and media the means to accelerate their digital business. Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications is a key component within Oracle’s intelligent, holistic offer introduction framework that enables higher commercial success with fewer offer launches. It starts with offer ideation, leveraging social, marketing and intelligent customer insights to generate relevant, personalized and timely offers for specific customer audiences. Once the offers are designed by Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications, the framework then enables the launch and presentation of offers through customers’ channels of choice, using AI to increase offer uptake and providing CSPs with real time offer analytics.

“As CSPs look to launch and expand new 5G and IoT-based digital services increasingly with ecosystem partners, it is essential they be able to accurately determine which offers are most likely to drive adoption with specific audiences,” said John Abraham, principal analyst, research, Analysys Mason. “But to drive profitable revenue growth, CSPs also need the operational agility to define and synchronize their product and offer details – what they sell, what gets ordered and delivered and what gets billed – across all participating systems.”

Embracing the Larger Comms Ecosystem through Open Standards

Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications is based on the TM Forum canonical communications model and supports full offer lifecycle management. As an enterprise catalog, Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications is pre-integrated with Oracle’s sales, commerce, fulfillment and billing capabilities and Oracle Siebel CRM for ease of importing catalog information. Oracle Enterprise Catalog for Communications also integrates with external participating systems using the standards-based TM Forum Open API as part of a broader concept to cash to care solution.

“With this announcement and as a signatory to the TM Forum Open API manifesto, Oracle is further demonstrating the industry value of adopting extensible open APIs to expose and consume a catalog of capabilities to drive innovation and monetization of new products and services,” said George Glass, vice president architecture & APIs, TM Forum. “The adoption of these APIs enables companies like Oracle to execute at digital speeds and capitalize on the opportunities presented by an increasingly connected world.”

Fashion Retailer Achieves Over 98 Percent Inventory Accuracy with Oracle

Kamal Osman Jamjoom Group (“KOJ”) believes that trust is the secret to success with customers, staff and business partners. One of the most established retail groups in the Gulf region, KOJ operates more than 700 stores with nine brands across seven countries. To meet service level expectations and optimize goods coming from three distribution centers, KOJ needed a more unified view of operational data. By modernizing with Oracle Retail, KOJ was able to improve store operations and drive higher levels of customer satisfaction through reliable, accurate merchandise availability. Today, a real-time view into inventory data has resulted in stock accuracy levels averaging 99.99 percent for online and 98.5 percent for in-store.

“KOJ is responsible for our own highly successful brands and multiple well-regarded international brands, with high growth rates. With the complexity of managing multiple brands and regions we needed greater control over products and inventory to support and exceed customer service levels,” said Ian Halliwell, deputy chief executive officer, Kamal Osman Jamjoom. “By leveraging the Oracle Retail platform, we have gained efficiencies and confidence fueled by an enterprise view of demand and our ability to fulfill inventory requirements across locations and touchpoints.”

KOJ began the work with Oracle in 2006 and recently upgraded to a modern version of the Oracle Retail Merchandise Operations suite, Warehouse Management and Store Inventory Management. By automating and optimizing retail process and workflow, KOJ gained efficiencies and saw a significant reduction in their labor costs.

The new implementation of Oracle Retail Merchandising Insights also improved visibility into inventory levels, item performance, sales trends, and customer demand. To achieve a single view of the customer across the business and gain a better understanding of customer behavior, the Group introduced Oracle Retail Customer Engagement and Oracle Retail Customer Insights. Now, store associates can access customer data in real-time, including purchasing and loyalty history. The modern Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service completes the seamless in-store customer experience. KOJ is also currently implementing Oracle Retail Order Broker to enhance inventory visibility and enable dynamic fulfillment for a buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere customer experience.

“Oracle continues to make significant investments in innovations that help retailers like KOJ keep pace with market and consumer expectations. By leveraging the integrated capabilities of Oracle Retail, KOJ can continue to grow its business and refine strategies to meet performance, growth and customer objectives,” said Mike Webster, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Retail.

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.

Short-Termism and Culture Clashes Are Biggest Barriers to Collaboration

A short-term mindset and entrenched cultural habits are the biggest barriers to collaboration between HR and finance teams according to a new study from Oracle. The study of 1,510 HR, finance and business professionals found that in order to successfully unlock the value from data and help their organizations adapt to the changing nature of the global talent market, HR teams need to rethink analytics technology, skills and processes to improve collaboration with finance and drive a competitive advantage.

“HR and finance departments bring different, yet complementary skills to the table. While they traditionally have not worked together closely, that needs to change in order for organizations to create a competitive advantage in today’s evolving market and talent economy,” said Donald Anderson, Director, Organization & Talent Development, Oracle. “The first step to overcoming traditional barriers and bringing HR and finance teams together is having a collaborative mindset with the right skillsets to both gather and analyze data so that it can be used to make impactful business decisions. That alone will deliver significant benefits to an organization’s performance.”

Having Data is Not the Same as Being Able to Use it Effectively

The global talent market is more competitive than ever with the rise of new technologies, climbing costs of recruitment and increasing demand for new skills. To be successful in this rapidly changing market, HR teams need to rethink their approach to analytics, skills and collaboration to drive a competitive advantage.

• 95 percent of HR and finance professionals plan to make data-driven collaboration a priority in 2019
• To act on data in a meaningful way, HR and finance teams will need to acquire new skills. The survey found that 49 percent cannot currently use analytics to forecast outcomes and 81 percent are unable to determine future actions based on predictive data.

It’s Not About More Technology, it’s About You

While data and analytics have proliferated HR and finance, the benefits are limited without effective collaboration and the ability to derive value. In order to reap the rewards, both departments must overcome short-termism, break through culture clashes and shrink the skillset gap.

• The biggest barrier to collaboration between HR and finance is a short-term mindset, with 71 percent saying their teams focus on quarters rather than future strategic direction.
• Culture clashes between departments was another top challenge with nearly a third (29 percent) ranking traditionally separate habits as the biggest barrier. Other barriers included mismatched skillsets (27 percentage) and organizational silos (17 percentage).
• HR teams also lack the skills to act on data and solve issues (70 percent), cultivate quantitative analysis and reasoning (67 percent) and use analytics to forecast workforce needs (55 percent).

HR and Finance Leaders Need One View of the Truth

The majority (80 percent) of organizations believe HR and finance teams are already helping them make better data-driven decisions. But, their teams will need to acquire new skills, but with an increased focus on collaboration, organizations will be able to gain even bigger business benefits:

• 88 percent of respondents believe HR and finance collaboration will improve business performance; 76 percent believe it will enhance organization agility.
• Over half (57 percent) of organizations plan to achieve more holistic, enterprise-wide insight through collaboration and 52 percent of HR and finance professionals believe it will help them become more strategic partners.

AI to Pave the Way to Greater Collaboration and Better Business Results

HR and finance professionals are looking to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to help drive business results:

• While a quarter (25 percent) of survey respondents are primarily using AI to identify at-risk talent and model their talent pipeline (22 percent), they are rarely using AI to forecast performance (18 percent) or find top talent (15 percent).
• Over the next year, 71 percent of survey respondents plan to use AI to predict high performing candidates in recruitment and source best-fit candidates with resume analysis (70 percent).
• Other AI priorities for survey respondents include modeling their talent pipeline (58 percent), flagging at-risk employees through attrition modeling (52 percent) and supporting employee interactions with chatbots (38 percent).

“The world of analytics and AI opens tremendous doors for HR to harness meaningful insights in order to make smarter decisions and create a talent advantage,” said Tom Davenport, Babson professor and analytics expert. “Seeing that so many HR professionals are planning to invest heavily in AI over the next year is promising. It means we’ll begin to see more strategic results and businesses competing on an entirely new level to find the right talent.”

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