SCIENCE

News Facts

• New Look is using Oracle Universal Content Management as the platform for its iLook enterprise social network enabling the international fashion retailer to connect and collaborate with its 27,000 employees and business partners worldwide.

• A truly international business, New Look has stores in 15 countries across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, a customer base that extends across 32 countries and is supported by suppliers in 40 countries.

• Developed initially in English, French and Flemish with plans to extend to additional languages over time, iLook is supporting New Look’s cultural shift from a UK-centric business to a more complex international business model and recently received the International Solution Award at the BT Expedite Retail Week Technology Awards.

• Part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family, Oracle Universal Content Management is well-aligned to New Look’s existing Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Intelligence solutions, allowing it to exploit a common platform for developing and integrating systems, aligning these with business processes and delivering Enterprise 2.0 capabilities.

• The iLook workspace provides New Look colleagues with access to company intelligence including corporate news, company videos, comprehensive staff directory and policy information, along with an online calendar and a cohesive marketing toolkit held as a central, shared resource for all marketing materials.

• Its enterprise social networking capabilities support collaboration between virtual teams and groups over blogs, wikis and forums to help dispersed teams to easily connect and drive best practice through their communication within project and departmental portals, irrespective of time zones.

• By extending the collaboration space to its global franchise partners, iLook provides access to sales assets, local messaging, press campaigns and images, along with direct communication with the local stores.

• iLook also provides a single source for all administrative forms helping New Look to automate expensive, time-intensive and manual processes.

• This latest deployment builds on New Look’s 10-year history of successfully relying on Oracle’s offerings which also includes Oracle Retail merchandising and planning applications and Oracle Database.

Supporting Quotes

“More than just an intranet, iLook is the way we communicate with each other and will help us become a business that is one world, one way,” said Linda Owen, Group HR Director, New Look. “iLook is a place where we can share information and news, and communicate with colleagues across the world. We’ve built it in a number of different languages, so that we can remain one New Look, one community.”

“New Look is at the forefront of the movement to utilise enterprise 2.0 technologies to connect and engage increasingly dispersed employee and partner networks,” said Adrian Thompson, Director of Business Change at New Look. “Building upon our heritage of technology innovation, particularly with Oracle, iLook is supporting our goals for rapid international expansion and helping our group to work together in the best way possible.”

“New Look is committed to finding smarter more innovative ways to work and iLook is delivering significant benefits throughout the business,” said Duncan Angove, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Retail. “Oracle is helping to equip New Look’s rapidly growing international business teams with the capabilities to communicate, collaborate and better serve their customers.”