SCIENCE

Sinopharm Pharmacy has standardized its operations using Oracle Retail Merchandising and Oracle E-Business Suite Financials 12.1 to support long-term growth and core merchandising and financial strategies.

With an aggressive, primarily acquisitive expansion strategy in place, Sinopharm Pharmacy has grown from 800 stores in 2008 to almost 1400 in 2010 and plans to have 2000 stores by the end of this year.

This rapid growth, combined with an IPO in 2009, revealed an urgent need for a cohesive system to better manage, support and further grow the business.

Following an evaluation of Oracle and SAP, Sinopharm Pharmacy recognized that Oracle’s rich retail functionality and open, scalable architecture offered industry best practice on which to standardize its business.

Oracle Retail Merchandising System, Oracle Retail Price Management, Oracle Retail Invoice Matching, Oracle Retail Sales Audit, Oracle Retail Allocation and Oracle Retail Data Warehouse, along with Oracle E-Business Suite Financials 12.1 have replaced multiple disparate systems helping Sinopharm Pharmacy to streamline and integrate its retail and financial operations.

The investment in January 2010 in these Oracle applications builds on the retailer’s existing deployments of Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Implementation was completed within nine months in November 2010 with support from IBM, and Sinopharm Pharmacy is currently rolling out the system by store chain.

Sinopharm Pharmacy is now preparing for the next phase of implementation involving Oracle Retail merchandise planning applications.

Results

Deployment of the Oracle Applications has helped enable Sinopharm Pharmacy to centralize control of core merchandising capabilities, standardizing processes and delivering a consistent source of master data.

Complex and multiple operational models for retail, wholesale, franchise, consignment, concession, central purchasing and de-centralised local buying have been consolidated by the Oracle Retail merchandising platform.

Accurate, more granular store and SKU-level data is also helping Sinopharm Pharmacy to develop strategies around lean assortments, improved supply chain planning and execution and demand-driven pricing.

Disparate data and accounting rules that existed in many of the acquired businesses have been unified by Oracle E-Business Suite Financials 12.1.1, providing greater visibility and more accurate data on retail financial performance.

Management is now able to make more informed decisions regarding the acceleration of store expansion, promotion of sales, reductions in inventory and increasing inventory turnover across the business.