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Making better business decisions requires retailers to break down silos between company divisions, and deliver scalable predictive tools that allow managers enterprise-wide to sift through mission-critical information.  Chain Store Age talked with Andrea Morgan-Vandome, VP retail strategy and solution marketing, Oracle Retail, about how retailers can use new BI tools to make it happen.

"It's become mission critical to understand what is going on across the enterprise and why it is happening," Morgan-Vandome explained. "To make this a reality, each different line of business user needs to get a perspective of activity impacting all divisions." Nine out of 10 C-level retail executives reported that their organization is collecting and managing an average of 98% more business information than two years ago, according to a recent survey conducted by Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif. And the sources are ever-growing. For example, 43% of data stems from customer information, 33% from operations, and 30% sales and marketing, according to the survey.

Oracle vp of retail strategy Andrea Vandome: A new generation of mobile analytics is at the forefront of change this year. We are emerging from three consecutive years in which consumers adopted smartphones in record numbers and used them to bridge desktop and in-store shopping. Retailers are moving quickly catch up. Recent advances in business intelligence, among them the ability to tap multiple sources and deliver to a mobile device in real-time, place line managers on more equal footing and equip them to better engage the omnichannel shopper.

...To create more compelling marketing campaigns, best-in-class retailers are focusing on collecting psychographic data that will complement demographic information, resulting in more in-depth segmentation, according to David Dorf, Senior Director of Technology Strategy for Oracle. Mobile and social media, he revealed, are two breeding grounds for this psychographic data. "Instead of just collecting information about age, gender and income, retailers today are starting to get information from social sites around interests and opinions to obtain a better picture of consumers," Dorf told Retail TouchPoints. While this more granular approach enables retailers to target consumers and refine marketing strategies to create more relevant campaigns, messaging and offers across channels, a lot of infrastructure is required to collect and manage all of this information. "Retailers need a full-time staff that creates the marketing messages and really engages people so that they'll give up that information," Dorf noted. "Then, of course, technology is required to process the structured and non-structured data and make something of those insights."

Like the other Oracle Retail Analytics modules, the new application is optimized to run on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Built on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, the solutions can deliver reports to mobile devices and desktops in a variety of formats.

Oracle has introduced its Retail Customer Analytics solution, joining Oracle Retail Merchandising Analytics in its family of BI applications. The new solution offers 10-plus pre-built dashboards based on nearly 100 key performance indicators (KPIs) and also allows users to frame ad hoc data analysis queries

Befitting its name, Oracle Retail Customer Analytics drills deep into customer data, surfacing metrics such as how promotions are performing, which customer segments translate into the most revenue, and how particular products sell across different demographic groups

The timing of this particular release couldn't be more appropriate though, if you remember earlier this week Oracle talked us through its thoughts on customer experience management at the Experience Revolution event in New York...

Oracle introduced Oracle Retail Customer Analytics, a new business intelligence solution designed to help retailers better understand what drives their customers' purchasing decisions..."The key to improving the customer experience is to understand the customer," said Greg Girard, Program Director, Merchandise Strategies, IDC Retail Insights. "Analytic solutions that help retailers gain insight into their customers' buying patterns lay the foundation for a deeper understanding and make it possible to create a personalized shopping experience while optimizing profitability."

In fact, in a scorecard published last month by Oracle Corp., 93 percent of C-level executives believe their organizations are losing revenue - as much as 10 percent per year, an average of $50.5 million - by not being able to fully leverage the information they collect. Among retail executives, 30 percent give their organization a "D"or "F" in preparedness to manage the data deluge...

Oracle is providing mobile business intelligence to store and district managers, as part of the entire retail operation

While there's been much focus on consumer mobile devices, there's also much to be gained from using mobile devices equipped to help run the business. This is especially true for retailers when critical, day-to-day decision-makers are in the field visiting stores. Imagine a district manager walking into a store with an iPad that provides current sales trends, inventory reports or labor productivity for that store, complete with exceptions highlighted and the ability to drill into details...

Today's analytics enable retailers to understand what's happening across channels, from inventory availability to what and how customers are buying

David Dorf, senior director of technology strategy for Oracle Retail, says the phrase "big data" first began to gain "buzz" status around five years ago. "It has come to represent the exponential growth of data and the complexity of analyzing it," he says. He starts with what has become the generic definition for big data - volume, variety and velocity. "Retailers have always dealt with big data in the sense that they handle thousands of [products], hundreds of stores and a steady stream of transactions," he says. "What's new is the variety of data. Some of it is highly formatted transactional data, but increasingly it's coming from sources such as a Twitter stream where there is natural language that's hard to understand using systems. The other thing that has changed is the velocity. Data is coming at us at a much faster pace."

David Dorf, senior director of technology strategy for Oracle Retail, says the phrase "big data" first began to gain "buzz" status around five years ago. "It has come to represent the exponential growth of data and the complexity of analyzing it," he says. He starts with what has become the generic definition for big data - volume, variety and velocity. "Retailers have always dealt with big data in the sense that they handle thousands of [products], hundreds of stores and a steady stream of transactions," he says. "What's new is the variety of data. Some of it is highly formatted transactional data, but increasingly it's coming from sources such as a Twitter stream where there is natural language that's hard to understand using systems. The other thing that has changed is the velocity. Data is coming at us at a much faster pace."

In today's marketplace, "agile growth means the ability for an organization to change to meet shifting customer needs," says Herman Nell, vice president and CIO, Petco Animal Supplies, who delivered the keynote address at last week's RIS Retail Executive

Footwear manufacturer and retailer Skechers U.S.A. said Tuesday it has upgraded and expanded its Oracle Applications investment, implemented Oracle Database and moved to Oracle On Demand to support rapid growth across its retail and wholesale channels.

Veterans Canteen Service (VCS) integrates Oracle Retail and Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 to control inventory.