Top-Kniga, a leading retailer and wholesaler in the Russian book market, has selected Oracle Retail merchandising, planning and data warehousing applications to help increase sales, performance and levels of customer service through more effective inventory management across its six wholesale warehouses and 500 stores in 180 Russian cities.
Top-Kniga, which sells more than 3 million books a month across its Litera, Las Knigas and Knigomir brands, expects the Oracle Retail platform to help improve forecasting capabilities, automate stock replenishment and provide management with valuable real-time data and analytics aimed at increasing inventory turnover and profitability, particularly among its wholesale customers.
Top-Kniga considers the Oracle Retail project an important step towards increasing the efficiency of the companys retail and wholesale businesses as it expands across Russia and into other CIS countries. In order to maintain its position at the forefront of the book market, Top-Kniga understood the benefits of creating a scalable core merchandising platform and related retail applications, alongside best practice processes. The deployment of Oracle Retail applications will support its strategy for improving customer service, efficiency and sales, enabling the company to bring new stores and locations online quickly, and to extend its range of services and printed media books and products.
Georgy Lyamin, general director of Top-Kniga, said, We expect the Oracle Retail applications will improve the analysis of customer demand, the forecasting process and streamline the process of stock replenishment along the whole supply chain, from the suppliers to warehouses and stores. We anticipate this will result in long-term competitive advantages for our company, increasing both customer numbers and loyalty. We expect to see the first results at the beginning of autumn 2007.
Top-Kniga identified Oracle Retail as the best fit for its strategic requirements, following an analysis of market applications, and selected Deloitte as its implementation partner. The initial project will focus on implementing the Oracle Retail Merchandising System, Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting and Oracle Retail Data Warehouse modules. As an existing Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customer, Top-Kniga understood the value of a phased implementation path and simplifying the integration process to achieve a rapid return on investment.
Oracles extensive experience through projects with many of the largest book retailers in the world, like WH Smith, supported the selection of the Oracle Retail applications, said Patrick Bohannon, Vice President for EMEA, Oracle Retail. Retailers in emerging markets like Russia and the CIS countries have studied the most successful retailers in established markets and identified how integrated IT systems and applications can impact the bottom line, improve margins and drive corporate growth. Oracle is committed to helping Top-Kniga compete more effectively in this increasingly competitive market.
About Top-Kniga
Top-Kniga is a leading wholesaler/retailer of books in Russia. Since 2004, Top-Kniga has been among the TOP-50 largest retailers in Russia. Top-Kniga currently owns six wholesale warehouses (in Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Moscow, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Saint Petersburg), with over 500 shops in over 180 cities in Russia, and sells over 3 million books per month.
The total retail space of the companys stores exceeds 100,000 square meters. The density and structure of the geographic distribution of Top-Kniga stores corresponds to the countrys population density and, therefore, over 60 percent of the Russian urban population has access to the companys retail network. Top-Knigas key to success is its focus on the customer. The company offers a wide variety of books and printed media products and is seeking to extend their range of services. Over 100,000 book titles are stored in the companys warehouses, which is more than the number of titles published annually in Russia.
Being at the forefront of the book market, Top-Kniga is continuing its expansion to other regions, including other CIS countries, and seeks to further develop the standards of its retail chain. Knigomir bookstores, Litera books and stationery supermarkets, Las-Knigas hypermarkets, Pishi-Chitay books and stationary stores and Soroka news agencies all come under the Top-Kniga umbrella.
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 and information technology solutions, Oracle partners with the worlds leading retail companies, including 17 of the top 20 retailers worldwide, to transform the economics of their businesses.
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