The eleventh largest textile retail company in Germany is pulling the plug on its SAP Retail project after a runtime of over 10 years: At the end of last year, Peek&Cloppenburg Düsseldorf decided to replace SAP completely with solutions from Oracle. The project to implement Oracle Retail as merchandise management system has already begun.
The retail company is being supported by implementation partner Retail Consult, which also introduced the solution at Marktkauf in 2003. At that time, the system, which comes from Retek, did not yet belong to Oracle. SAP had also recognised the value of Retek for retail, but came away empty-handed in a gigantic bidding war with Oracle in 2005. The coveted US-based merchandise management system Retek went to Oracle.
It is presumably particularly dramatic for SAP that Peek&Cloppenburg Düsseldorf wants to replace the Walldorf software giant’s solutions with Oracle even in the areas of finance and controlling. The clothing retailer had opted for SAP Retail over 10 years ago and successfully introduced the retail management solutions at wholesale level. According to project team members, however, SAP Retail was never fully implemented at the important retail level.
Serialisation proved disastrous
The major mistake in the project, several project participants report independently of each other, was to try to map Peek&Cloppenburg’s so-called serialisation in SAP. Serialisation meant the retail company’s unusual practice of tracking every single item with an individual number through the systems. A procedure that is desirable for the complete traceability of fresh meat, but a bit too much of a good thing for the textile retail industry.
In the meantime, Peek&Cloppenburg has abandoned the serialisation of its goods. However, the SAP project failed at retail level, among other things, because of the attempt to map this serialisation in SAP. The system of the Walldorf software giant was not able to do this. According to project participants, however, SAP had stated that it would work after all. This led to considerable delays and additional costs in the introduction of SAP Retail, which has now finally been terminated.
Oracle planning solutions established at P&C
Oracle solutions are by no means new to Peek&Cloppenburg Düsseldorf. The company has been successfully working with the Oracle Merchandise Financial Planning and Oracle Assortement & Item Planning solutions since 2013. But Peek&Cloppenburg also uses the important Demand Forecasting and Size Profile Optimization solutions from Oracle. The specialists from Quickborn were implementation partners for these solutions. The fact that SAP was unable to offer anything adequate in this planning area at that time was also a problem for other large textile retailers with SAP Retail, such as the KarstadtQuelle Group.
Last year, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) advised Peek&Cloppenburg on the decision for a new merchandise management system. The French department store operator Galeries Lafayette was an important reference customer among the Oracle Retail users.
Official enquiries by The Retail Optimiser to Peek&Cloppenburg Düsseldorf on the subject have so far remained unanswered. In Germany, there is another company called Peek&Cloppenburg, which is based in Hamburg. To avoid confusion, The Retail Optimiser therefore states the company headquarters in connection with the company name.
