The Neiman Marcus Group, which includes the Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman specialty stores, was finding it difficult to stay competitive in the tight retail market, especially since its financial and procurement applications were old, complex and difficult to maintain and manage.

With help from Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGE&Y), the retailer decided to implement Oracle’s E-Business Suite of applications in an effort to standardize its applications and streamline the process of analyzing store performance.

"We needed to improve internal efficiencies, which meant changing processes,” said Dale Stapleton, vice president and controller at Neiman Marcus Group. “The Oracle applications help us create and deliver comprehensive reports, giving us better, more timely insight into our operations. Before, we were aggregating a lot of incomplete information from different sources at the end of the month when it was too late to act."

In fact, the move has helped Neiman Marcus replace and consolidate its disparate accounting systems with one secure, scalable system, Stapleton said.

Neiman Marcus deployed Oracle’s “report-to-close” financials and “procure-to-pay” procurement applications. Report-to-close includes everything a retailer would need to handle end-to-end financial transactions, including general ledger, accounts payable and fixed assets. With the package up and running, the retailer has the ability to view its financial data on a total enterprise basis, something that was nearly impossible before.

Neiman Marcus also implemented Oracle’s "procure-to-pay," which includes Oracle’s procurement, purchasing, order management, inventory management, accounts payable, property manager and projects modules.

Stapleton said the modules help Neiman Marcus harness the company’s collective purchasing power and lower overhead costs because they enable the retailer to process pre-authorized employee transactions for non-merchandise items, such as store fixtures and supplies. The real estate and project management solutions also create better controls on large capital projects, and provide for better, centralized management of lease payments.

The retailer plans to add Oracle iSupplier Portal and Oracle Sourcing over the next year or so in order to further consolidate its purchasing and negotiate optimal volume discounts from preferred suppliers.

With CGE&Y’s help, it took less than a year to completely strip out Neiman Marcus’ legacy procurement and financial systems and implement the Oracle applications.

"The combination of Oracle retail solutions and CGE&Y&singlequot;s implementation expertise has provided Neiman Marcus with a world-class system for financial management and cost control, enabling us to attain enterprise-wide visibility and control and exploit cost savings for competitive advantage," Stapleton said.