Case study: New Look looks to SOA

New Look is a British fashion retailer that has more than 600 stores across Europe as well as a website.

It is one of the big retailers in terms of the women's clothing market and is a growing presence in the men's and children's markets.

New Look was looking for a way to increase its flexibility as well grow internationally. Although it did have stores in France and Belgium as well as the Middle East, it was also looking to "strengthen its foundations" for future growth.

To achieve this, it implemented a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) solution from Oracle that was aimed at supporting existing and future IT investments. New Look was also looking to speed up business performance by re-engineering its buying and merchandising functions.

With a business-focused approach, the SOA programme delivered real-time savings to the business and marketing teams, as well as brought integration and expansion benefits.

On top of this, the accuracy of its 40 million stock-keeping units (SKU) store records have been improved. This helped to eliminate errors, ensure of markdown costs were properly assigned, and led to suppliers getting orders up to a week earlier than they used to.

"SOA has been a huge success within New Look and investing early in this emerging technology has created real value," said Carl McPhail, chief executive of New Look, in a statement.

"Oracle SOA Suite has enabled us to focus on processes and the way we work, stripping significant non-value effort from the buying and merchandising teams, which in turn, has enabled them to focus on growing the business," he said.

"More importantly, SOA has helped us create a flexible platform for supporting our strategic expansion," he added.

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