EUROPEANNEWS 09


AURORA SWAPS BRICKS FOR CLICKS IN NETHERLANDS


Following its andotherbrands.com roll out in the US and Australia in May, Aurora Fashions will launching its local language, multi brand e-commerce site in Holland this September.


The group behind UK women’s


fashion brands Coast, Oasis and Warehouse recently announced it will replicate the success of its andotherbrands.com strategy as part of new plans for the Dutch market.


Ahead of September’s e- commerce roll out, Aurora will exit 11 Oasis and Warehouse concessions in the Netherland’s department store chain Vroom and Dressman over the summer. It stated that the decision was in line with the group’s ‘omnichannel’ retail strategy for 2012, which aims to drive international presence and growth for all three brands via a ‘right-fi t’ market approach, without always relying on a traditional bricks and mortar footprint. The tabulated site platform, already launched in Germany, the US and Australia, is designed to provide a one-stop-shop for all of the brands, allowing customers to shop using one basket and combined checkout. The aggregated consumer offering is supported by a sophisticated distribution system and local payment terms. Mike Shearwood, Aurora Fashions chief executive, commented: “Omnichannel isn’t multichannel by default; it’s also about adopting an intelligent approach to market presence that provides the best customer journey. Based on the success of our existing multiple brand sites, we believe we can best serve the customer and accelerate growth in the Netherlands with an online only approach in the short to mid-term.”


INTERMARCHÉ OPTIMISES COLLABORATION


F


rench retailer and part of Les Mousquetaires group, Intermarché, has partnered


with Trace One to implement a collaborative online portal designed for to manage its private label products. The Trace One software-as-


a-service (SaaS) portal allows Intermarché to manage all upstream and downstream processes for its products including: management of tracking from initial tender to product end-of-life; through selection, panel management, audits and development of the product specifi cation. The retailer is using the platform


to rationalise and reinforce its private label products offering while increasing productivity at the same time. “Our objective is to share our information more rapidly with our suppliers and reduce the administrative load for everyone in the process,” declared Thierry Cotillard, Intermarché director of food. “We were particularly appreciative of the community of suppliers already connected to Trace One and of the principle of private workspaces, which allow each supplier to share exchanges with multiple retailers across Europe,” added Cotillard. “For us, this is a guarantee of quality and speed in information exchanges with our suppliers.”


The platform will manage more than 4,500 Intermarché food and household product references every year for, improving the quality of information and the visibility on these projects, while substantially reducing time often wasted between each participant with traditional email and telephone communications. As a result, Intermarché projects a signifi cant reduction in the overall development time for its products.


After the initial implementation of the module for managing product specifi cations for all private label suppliers of Intermarché and Netto, three further phases are scheduled over this year: management of online product packaging development, administration of the process for tenders to work collaboratively with suppliers, and fi nally complete management of its approach to product quality (audits, panels, complaints, etc.). Trace One said its e-collaborative


platform features 12,500 manufacturers and more than 40,000 product specifi cations from around the world.


DUTCH COOP ANALYSES ASSORTMENTS


Coop Supermarkten has selected JDA Space Planning, JDA Floor Planning, and JDA Intactix Knowledge Base to optimise and customise its store assortments. Bert Nijland, Coop Supermarkten operational commercial manager, stated:


“The JDA solutions will help our space managers dedicate more time to creating planograms that are better suited to our local customer tastes and preferences, featuring more targeted, higher quality assortments and choices. We are very excited to make this a reality for our customers.” JDA global alliance member Capgemini will manage the JDA space and


category management implementation in cooperation with the supermarket, which operates more than 211 stores in the Netherlands.


◆ ExtraHop Networks, a network-based application performance management (APM) provider, has signed Axstores, a retail group in the Nordic region with more than 390 beauty, fashion, home furnishing and department stores, as a new customer. Axstores can now see all of its networked devices and their dependencies, as well as the application performance impact of core network services.


◆ Dutch supermarket chain PLUS has selected open source Zarafa’s Communication and Collaboration Platform running on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 enterprise operating system. The


implementation, which was completed in early 2012, creates a hybrid environment in which Zarafa and the supermarket’s email archiving systems are separate and saved on different types of storage, enabling PLUS to realise cost savings.


MAY/JUNE 2012 RETAIL TECHNOLOGY


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