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Copyright © 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. |
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Release Notes
Release 15.0
E69592-01
December 2015
This document highlights the major changes for Release 15.0 of Oracle Retail Price Management (RPM).
RPM is a pricing and promotions execution system. RPM functionality includes the definition, maintenance, and review of price changes, clearances, and promotions.
RPM capabilities range from simple item price changes at a single location to complex multi-buy promotions across zones.
See the Oracle Retail Price Management Installation Guide, Release 15.0 for information about the following:
Hardware and software requirements
Oracle Retail application software compatibility
The following are functional enhancements for Oracle Retail Price Management Release 15.0.
RPM supports the creation of transaction promotion components for retailers that want customers to get a discount on their entire purchase or shopping basket. One key customer request for this promotion type is the ability to "exclude" designated products from the promotion. For example, a retailer may want to create a promotion where a customer can purchase any item in the store and get a percent or amount with the exclusion of a single department or group of items. This new feature supports the setup of item exclusions for a transaction promotion component.
The system now allows for the ability to assign item level exclusions that are a subset of the items previously assigned to the buy list. The ability to create item exclusions is supported at all levels of the merchandise hierarchy including: department, class, subclass, parent item, parent item differentiator or transaction item. Transaction promotion component exclusion handling is different from exclusions created for simple promotion components, which are always at transaction item level. Exclusions can also be created using RMS item lists or RPM price event item lists.
This new feature does not include location-level exclusions or exceptions created at the item or location level.
For more information, including functional details, see the Oracle Retail Merchandising Implementation Guide.
In RPM 14.0, the transaction promotion component type was added, and RPM 15.0 includes new rules that apply for this promotion type only.
Promotion overlap rules have been modified so that transaction promotion components are not included in the overall count for overlapping promotion components.
Conflict check rules have also been reduced for transaction promotion components. The conflict check rules listed below are enforced, while all other conflict check rules are bypassed:
Multiple promotions for a customer segment
Only one promotion can exist on the timeline at any point for an item/location/customer type.
Approving a promotion exclusion to an already active promotion
This rule ensures that a user is not able to approve a promotion for an item/location when an active promotion level exclusion exists for that item/location.
Clearances and promotions cannot overlap unless the clearance overlap indicator is "Y".
Promotion constraint validation
New item/location price events are validated against promotion constraint rules.
For more information, including functional details, see the Oracle Retail Merchandising Implementation Guide.
A modification was made to RPM 13.2.x in order to allow for a price guide selection when an item list is used during a price event creation, including an RMS item list or an RPM price event item list. This change made price guides available. However, no validation was established to confirm that the price guide setup details matched the items attached to the price event. For example: if multiple departments were included in an item list, the price guide applied to all items regardless of department attached to the price guide.
In RPM 15.0, the rules have been expanded to include validation. When an item list is used, the selected price guide applies only to items for the department assigned to the price guide. If the item list contains departments not set up for the selected price guide, the price guide rules are ignored for those items. If the price guide is set up at the corporate level, the price guide rules apply to all items.For more information, including functional details, see the Oracle Retail Merchandising Implementation Guide.
The system option for displaying full column detail in the price event user interface has presented performance issues for multiple retailers. Previously, Oracle Retail recommended that this system option not be turned "ON," but in this release of RPM, the system option has been removed.
The functionality being removed disallows the ability to "always" display the full column detail. Note that users will continue to have the option to see full column details by clicking the Add Column Detail button in the user interface (UI) after highlighting a specific row or rows on the table.
This change removes the system options for Display Full Price Change/Clearance Column Detail and Display Full Promotion Column Detail.
For more information, including functional details, see the Oracle Retail Merchandising Implementation Guide.
In previous versions of RPM, if a user approves an emergency event that is to take effect on the same day it is being approved, and the event is large enough to be processed through the chunk conflict checking process flow, that event was not sent to RMS until the nightly batch cycle. This restriction was problematic for retailers because their business practices regularly utilized chunk conflict checking for emergency events.
In RPM 15.0, chunk conflict checking now checks for emergency events and stages data specific to those events for a new batch process to pick up and provide data to RMS throughout the day. The new batch is a PL/SQL batch that is multi-step and multi-threaded. It follows the same basic process flow for the three price event execution batch processes used to normally inform RMS about price events taking effect. This batch processes only data that chunk conflict checking has flagged as emergency events. It does not pick up future events to send to RMS, but allows the standard price event execution processing to process such events.
If data is not passed to RMS for emergency events processed through chunk conflict checking throughout the day, the standard price event execution batch processes retrieves those same events and updates RMS during the batch cycle.
For more information, see the Oracle Retail Merchandising Implementation Guide for functional details and the Oracle Retail Price Management Operations Guide for technical details.
The technical enhancements described below are included in this release.
When Transaction promotions were introduced in RPM 14.0, they were designed to skip the normal conflict checking process flow. To allow for filtering based on the apply to value, the majority of conflict checking was still processed through, but only retaining payload data. In RPM 15.0, transaction promotions follow the same conflict checking process flow as other complex promotions.
This functionality means that when the Skip Conflict Checking system option is turned on, transaction promotions perform minimal internal processing and have payload data created based on the items and locations in the promotion detail. Filtering on the apply to value cannot occur. The system reflects the application of the promotion to all valid item/location combinations under the promotion detail.
Even when skipping conflict checking, a limited set of rules continue to be applied. These rules are:
Restricting customer segment promotions to one promotion detail for a given item, location, date, and customer segment combination.
Not allowing a clearance to overlap with a transaction promotion unless the associated system option is set to allow it.
Enforcing promotion constraints unless the promotion detail has been created such that promotion constraints are to be ignored.
In the NewItemLoc batch, the final portion of the processing is called 'complete processing,' which includes future retail rollup processing and the item location staging table clean up. Existing functionality did not support restart recovery in the case of an error on a thread in that final portion of processing.
In this release of RPM, if any thread encounters an error during the complete processing portion of the batch, data is staged separately. When running the batch in restart mode, the system is now thus able to identify what threads need to be run through this process again.
For more information, including technical details, see the Oracle Retail Price Management Operations Guide.
All RPM batches have been enhanced to record when the batch was run. Each batch process records the overall start and end time, along with a completion status. Additionally, each batch records what parameters were provided such as username, log and error paths, logical unit of work values, and concurrent thread limitations. For threaded batches, each individual thread records its own start and end time along with a completion status.
In previous releases of RPM, clearance reset data was moved from the RPM_CLEARANCE table and onto the RPM_CLEARANCE_RESET table. Some columns on the RPM_CLEARANCE table were deprecated but left in place. Those columns were for flagging a record as being a clearance reset, and for linking a reset record to a clearance record. Those columns were removed in RPM 15.0.
In previous releases, RMS introduced a batch window indicator. The indicator signified whether or not the merchandise batch window was active or not. The indicator was updated by the RMS pre-post batch before and after all other Oracle Retail Merchandising Operations Management batch processes were executed.
RPM now leverages that indicator to prevent users from using the RPM UI, Web Services, and Injector Price Event Batch while the merchandise batch window is active. This logic prevents users from creating price events or other transactions that could interfere with the batch processing.
The extract file layouts for Price Changes, Clearances, and Promotions have been modified. In this release, RPM creates one file per location based on the staged payload data. Since each file is generated by location, all location details have been removed from the file with the exception of the file header record.
The filename format has changed to include the location and location type using the following format: <event_type>_<timestamp>_<location>_<loc_type>.dat.
This technical enhancements described below are included in this release.
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Note: The list below announces the addition of Oracle Retail support for the technology described. See the Installation Guide requirements section for critical information, such as whether the enhancement below replaces previous versions or is supported in addition to already existing versions. |
The passages below address integration enhancements in this release of RPM
RPM serves as the source of pricing data to the store. This data is integrated between RPM and the Oracle Retail Xstore Suite as part of the 15.0 Release. This integration point includes all regular price changes, clearance price changes and promotional price changes. The information is provided in a delimited flat file format with data organized by location. This flat file format is consistent with what was in place for previous releases, with a few modifications including location specific files rather than enterprise wide files.
For more information see the Oracle Retail Xstore Suite 15.0/Oracle Retail Merchandising 15.0 Implementation Guide.
A new external promotion API has been provided to support the promotional information shown in the PO Arrival report for the Allocation dashboard. However, it was built in such a way that it can be used by other applications, as well. This API retrieves all promotion details, including promotion component types for simple, threshold, finance, transaction, and multi-buy, to be processed from the RPM promotion tables and distributes the details down to the item-location level. Any promotion detail that is either Active or Approved and is effective at any point in the next four weeks is staged. Note: Item ranging is not validated for the staged data, so any system using the data must ensure that only ranged item locations are queried.
For more information, including technical details, see the Oracle Retail Price Management Operations Guide.
For more information, see the following documents in the Oracle Retail Price Management Release 15.0 documentation set:
Oracle Retail Price Management User Guide
Oracle Retail Price Management Operations Guide
Oracle Retail Price Management Installation Guide
Oracle Retail Price Management Data Model
Oracle Retail Merchandising Security Guide
Oracle Retail Merchandising Data Conversion Operations Guide
Oracle Retail Merchandising Implementation Guide
Oracle Retail Merchandising Batch Schedule
Oracle Retail POS Suite 14.1/Merchandising Operations Management 15.0 Implementation Guide
Oracle Retail Xstore Suite 15.0/Oracle Retail Merchandising 15.0 Implementation Guide
The following documents are available through My Oracle Support. Access My Oracle Support at the following URL:
This guide describes the approach that each Oracle Retail Merchandising Operations Management application takes for the upgrading process, as well as its upgrade assumptions and considerations. Actual procedures for the upgrade may be included in the application's Installation Guide.
The tests in this document have been created to assist in verifying (smoke testing) that the installation of the following products was successful: RMS, ReSA, RTM, Oracle Retail Allocation, ReIM, ARI, and RPM. These tests are not intended to verify all functionality in the suite of products previously listed.
The following document is available on the My Oracle Support Web site. Access My Oracle Support at the following URL:
https://support.oracle.com
Online training is available to Oracle supported customers at product release. These online courses provide release-specific product knowledge that enables your functional and technical teams to plan, implement and/or upgrade and support Oracle Retail applications effectively and efficiently.
For information about Oracle's commitment to accessibility, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program website at http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=docacc.
Access to Oracle Support
Oracle customers that have purchased support have access to electronic support through My Oracle Support. For information, visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=info or visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=trs if you are hearing impaired.
Oracle® Retail Price Management Release Notes, Release 15.0
E69592-01
Copyright © 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
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Value-Added Reseller (VAR) Language
Oracle Retail VAR Applications
The following restrictions and provisions only apply to the programs referred to in this section and licensed to you. You acknowledge that the programs may contain third party software (VAR applications) licensed to Oracle. Depending upon your product and its version number, the VAR applications may include:
(i) the MicroStrategy Components developed and licensed by MicroStrategy Services Corporation (MicroStrategy) of McLean, Virginia to Oracle and imbedded in the MicroStrategy for Oracle Retail Data Warehouse and MicroStrategy for Oracle Retail Planning & Optimization applications.
(ii) the Wavelink component developed and licensed by Wavelink Corporation (Wavelink) of Kirkland, Washington, to Oracle and imbedded in Oracle Retail Mobile Store Inventory Management.
(iii) the software component known as Access Via™ licensed by Access Via of Seattle, Washington, and imbedded in Oracle Retail Signs and Oracle Retail Labels and Tags.
(iv) the software component known as Adobe Flex™ licensed by Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, California, and imbedded in Oracle Retail Promotion Planning & Optimization application.
You acknowledge and confirm that Oracle grants you use of only the object code of the VAR Applications. Oracle will not deliver source code to the VAR Applications to you. Notwithstanding any other term or condition of the agreement and this ordering document, you shall not cause or permit alteration of any VAR Applications. For purposes of this section, "alteration" refers to all alterations, translations, upgrades, enhancements, customizations or modifications of all or any portion of the VAR Applications including all reconfigurations, reassembly or reverse assembly, re-engineering or reverse engineering and recompilations or reverse compilations of the VAR Applications or any derivatives of the VAR Applications. You acknowledge that it shall be a breach of the agreement to utilize the relationship, and/or confidential information of the VAR Applications for purposes of competitive discovery.
The VAR Applications contain trade secrets of Oracle and Oracle's licensors and Customer shall not attempt, cause, or permit the alteration, decompilation, reverse engineering, disassembly or other reduction of the VAR Applications to a human perceivable form. Oracle reserves the right to replace, with functional equivalent software, any of the VAR Applications in future releases of the applicable program.