NARTA International Pty Ltd: Integrated Services for Retailers, Brands, and Consumers

For more than five decades now, National Associated Retail Traders of Australia (NARTA) International Pty Ltd has been an integral and irreplaceable part of the Australasian retail landscape. Established in 1965 with the foundation of buying, NARTA consists of 33 retailers across Australia and New Zealand with a combined buying power of more than AU$4 Billion annually in the consumer electronics, kitchen and laundry, and indirect markets. As the largest retail services and buying group in Australasia, NARTA ensures a unified ecosystem for retailers and brands, delivering value and profitability to the members. Innovating the retail space at each step, the group offers comprehensive support services, including procurement, insurance, marketing, and data analytics.

Through an integrated service model, NARTA focuses on providing sustainability to retailers, efficiencies to brand partners, and promoting products and technologies along with increasing choice for consumers.

Along with representing retail members in the group, NARTA has over 900 stores that service all socioeconomic and geographic demographics of the market. Under its buying and merchandising services, the group works with core brands and retailers to implement a strategy, ensuring group disciplines, buying benefits, scale and relevance.

This includes negotiating and managing exclusive brands and models, working with retailers on delivering in-store execution in line with brand expectations, and managing forecasting programs with the retailers on behalf of the brands.

Further, NARTA offers a full suite of marketing services and efficient campaign creation using the latest trends and technologies and delivering shared learning that provides the opportunity to maximize ROI. Through omni-channel strategy incorporating costeffective and innovative solutions in both traditional and new channels, the group brings together all partners, retailers, and brands to communicate their brand and product messages to consumers. While providing such innovative offerings, NARTA is also revolutionizing how data is used in the retail space through its unique approach of handling the data within the organization. The group has developed processes to continuously clean and integrate the sales data coming from retailers, creating a unique system in Australia that’s fed from over 300 million records a year. This finds applications in supporting numerous sets of AI portals and dashboards to report market data for a range of product categories and using for sales forecasting and inventory management. NARTA has developed an AI-based ETL system that processes over six million records from twentyfour different sources weekly. The group also focuses on optimization and integration of business processes through automation, thereby reducing errors and saving time.

NARTA is home to a very successful and renowned procurement division that helps members functioning as an inhouse managed service, overseeing the end-to-end category management and implementation of procurement data and systems. The group collates retailer needs and presents unified sets of requirements for brands to bid on. These benefits offered through procurement services have been recognized by industry bodies within Australia and abroad. NARTA Procurement has been named as finalists in various awards, including the 2017 Procurement and Supply Australasia Awards (Melbourne), 2018 Procurement Leaders Asia-Pacific Procurement Awards (Singapore), and 2019 Procurement Leaders World Procurement Awards (London), to name a few. With such ingenious services, NARTA is undoubtedly at the forefront of innovation for the future. With the mission to be the most progressive buying and service group in the world, the group plans to focus on producing results that sustain retailers in the long term and revolutionizing the retail landscape