European fashion retailer optimizes inventory around customer

Sportina Group is segmenting its planning across customer preferences and countries.

The Slovenia-based retailer, which curates fashion collections for women, men, and children across 90 brands and operates more than 350 stores in 11 European nations, is standardizing its diverse business on the cloud-based Oracle Retail technology platform. Sportina’s primary goals are to break down barriers between geographies and brands, in turn optimizing inventory availability for customers.  

Sportina segments its portfolio brands into five segments including luxury, premium, core, entry and casual. The segmentation is oriented around customers’ individual styles and preferences. By delivering what a consumer wants, Sportina can avoid markdowns and increase gross margin. 

With Oracle Retail solutions providing full visibility to inventory availability across all channels, Sportina intends to decrease transfer costs and increase stock rotation. The retailer has increased its stock rotation and decreased transfer costs by implementing an initial and replenishment order split.

“Sportina Group supports a range of different business models, including our own brand, multi-brand, franchise, and wholesale. In order to support this complexity, we recognized the need to centralize and consolidate our planning processes to deliver transparency,” Miha Rozman, head of controlling, Sportina. “Sportina is an efficient and fast-moving fashion retailer. We chose Oracle to improve efficiency and increase productivity. Most importantly, this modernization allowed us to design a new planning process that places the customer at the center of our operations from the strategic vision through the planning to execution.”

Working with Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) member Pronos, Sportina implemented Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning in 16 weeks. This was followed by an implementation of an Oracle Retail Lifecycle Inventory Planning framework designed by Oracle Retail Consulting in under eight months. Next, Pronos will assist Sportina with the implementation of Oracle Retail Offer Optimization.

Sportina operates multi-brand Sportina and XYZ stores, mono-brand stores, and outlet units in Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania, Kosovo, Italy, and Austria.