| Oracle® Retail Merchandising Implementation Guide Release 14.1 E56350-01 |
|
 Previous |
This chapter is an overview of Oracle Retail Active Retail Intelligence (ARI).
ARI takes business rules that users are applying to reports in their daily tasks and applies them directly to the retail systems. This allows the correct people within the retail organization to be alerted when the business rule conditions have been met and informs them of what the appropriate actions might be to resolve it. This enables a retailer to apply the best practice to their entire organization by tying actions to information in an intelligent way.
A business example of an exception reporting rule is a rule that looks for orders that are past their ship date but have not been shipped yet. Rather than having an analyst scan a report to identify which orders have been shipped late a rule could be created in ARI to identify these orders for the analyst and the recommended steps to take to resolve the late shipping issue with the vendor.
ARI maps out a retailer's business processes and notifies the users responsible for those processes whenever new tasks require attention. ARI also lists the appropriate actions that might be taken to complete these tasks and allows users to take action directly from the screen where they receive the alert.
If the alert is not acted on within an acceptable timeframe, ARI can define an automated action that needs to take place. This can be to raise the priority of the alert or send it to a supervisor or take an automated system action to ensure that single users do not become a bottleneck.
A business example of a workflow management rule is a rule that notifies an inventory manager when orders are ready for approval. This gives the manager instant visibility to all orders that need to be approved for the day rather than requiring the manager to search for orders meeting this requirement. Additional logic can also be added to notify the manager's supervisor when orders awaiting approval are not approved after a pre-determined timeframe.
ARI allows a retailer to modify process within Oracle Retail to more closely match their business processes. This is achieved in most cases without modifying the underlying retail system.
A business example of an Enterprise Process Modification is a client changing its transfer approval process from analysts being able to approve transfers to only managers being able to approve transfers. Rules could be developed in ARI to send alerts to both the analyst and manager when transfers are submitted to educate them on the new business process to help ensure a smooth transition.
ARI is a monitoring system that interacts with any applications database. As such it does not use any information from other retailing applications; rather, it monitors the retailing application databases for events defined by a client and notifies the client when said events occur.
The only complication that can result is when a client is making database changes that affect the data mapping for rules already defined in ARI. In this case the rule needs to be changed to reflect the new data mapping.
Active Retail Intelligence provides no special security features or safeguards. Addressing any site-specific security issues involving Active Retail Intelligence is the customer's responsibility. Security settings in other applications with which Active Retail Intelligence interacts are not overridden or circumvented by Active Retail Intelligence. Whereas this is generally desirable, it is a consideration when determining to whom to route Active Retail Intelligence alerts. Sending an alert to a user who does not have the privileges to take the actions necessary to resolve the event might prove frustrating and counter-productive. Users should be educated about this issue so that they avoid forward events that have actions with limited access as well.
At a data level, Active Retail Intelligence detection is necessarily done with full access privileges to all data. Individual users with data level security might see different values for some parameters (in particular those involving sums) than the values seen by Active Retail Intelligence. This might cause adverse effects such as a user looking at an event automatically causing it to close because the user's limited data access causes the event to see values that make Active Retail Intelligence think the exception is no longer an issue when in fact it still is. For this reason, Oracle urges extreme caution when designing Active Retail Intelligence processes that involve users with limited data access. The consequences of missing alerts are great in an exception driven enterprise, so extra care is needed in the technical analysis of how such Active Retail Intelligence processes behave.
