| Oracle® Retail Item Planning Operations Guide Release 14.1 E55313-01 |
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The following information needs to be considered before configuring Item Planning:
It is recommended that you have at least two years of historical sales and inventory data for creating item plans. Less data can be used, but the more data that is available, the more statistical significance can be given to the item plans.
It is also important to have at least two years of history to support the embedded forecast functionality within Item Planning. With less than two years of history, the forecast may not generate the optimal results.
The following factors can affect hardware space requirements:
Style-color—number of style-colors. A style-color is the combination of the style information, such as fleece jacket, and color, such as navy.
Store—number of physical, web, and other distinct retail outlets. Although Item Planning does not go down to the store level, data may be loaded at this level.
Calendar—number of historical and future time periods in the domain. This impacts the overall size of the environment.
Workbooks—amount of space used by workbooks. This is typically greater than the domain itself. The number of workbooks is related to the number of users.
Partitioning is done to avoid contention for resources. Building a workbook and committing data are two processes that can cause contention.
How data is partitioned has an impact on the business process. The Item Planning domain is defined as a global domain. For performance reasons, a single domain is not recommended. There should be an even distribution of users across a set of local domains. For example, men's merchandise could be in a domain, women's merchandise in a domain, and children's merchandise in a domain. When a user is committing data in the men's merchandise domain, this will not affect the users in the women's or children's domains because of the use of partitioning.
Consider the following questions when defining the partitioning of the domain:
How do I partition to meet my business needs?
How do I partition my users?
How do I create groups of users to further partition the solution?
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Note: The partitioning level in the Item Planning configuration is Group. It is recommended that this not be changed. |
Formatting can be done in the configuration or the workbook after the domain is built.
In the configuration, an implementer can create generic styles for the measures and assign them to measure components or realized measures. For each measure, these styles can be overridden on each workbook template. Formatting can only be changed by using the RPAS Configuration Tools. For more information, see the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Configuration Tools User Guide.
To set up worksheet sizes and placements, exception value formatting, gridlines, and other formatting, once the domain is built, the implementer or a user can instantiate a workbook of the template to set up specific formatting and use the Format menu. The implementer can then save the format to the template so that it is available to all users for any newly created workbooks. For information on how to use the Format menu, see the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server User Guide for the Classic Client or Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server User Guide for the Fusion Client.
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Note: There is no Configuration Tools plug-in for Item Planning. |
Plug-ins are application-specific Java code modules that run inside and automate the RPAS Configuration Tools to assist the implementer with specific application configuration. There are rules that an implementer must follow when configuring an application. A plug-in makes such adherence easier by automating parts of the configuration process and validity-checking entries that are made.
With a new release, there are two types of patches that can affect the Item Planning domain:
Changes to the code in the RPAS libraries.
The configuration is not affected by this type of patch. For these types of changes, applying the patch is a straightforward process.
Changes to the configuration.
These types of changes can be more complex. If a retailer has customizations in the configuration, the customizations must be redone on the new configuration before the patch is installed.
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Note: Starting with Release 13.3, RPAS uses integer indexing for hierarchy positions. As a result, the upgrade process of a given solution includes a conversion process. For more information on the migration process to RPAS 13.3, refer to the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide.Complete the steps in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide for converting and upgrading your domain. |
Batch scripts are lists of commands or jobs executed without human intervention. A batch window is the time frame in which the batch process must run. It is the upper limit on how long the batch can take. Batch scripts are used for importing and exporting data and for generating item plans. The retailer needs to decide the best time for running batch scripts within the available batch window.
How often to upload updated sales and inventory data and how often to recreate item plans needs to be determined.
Consider at what interval to load the latest sales and inventory data. A weekly load of transactional type data is supported since the base intersection is at week. It is recommended that the information coming from other Fashion Bundle application be loaded daily.
Product availability and seasonal changes can be reasons for recalculating the item plans. It can also be triggered by the addition of new products and availability of substantial new sales and inventory history.
To define workbook template security, the system administrator grants individual users, or user groups, access to specific workbook templates. Granting access to workbook templates provides users the ability to create, modify, save, and commit workbooks for the assigned workbook templates. Users are typically assigned to groups based on their user application (or solution) role. Users in the same group can be given access to workbook templates that belong to that group alone. Users can be assigned to more than one group and granted workbook template access without belonging to the user group that typically uses a specific workbook template. Workbook access is either denied, read-only, or full access. Read-only access allows a user to create a workbook for the template, but the user is not able to edit any values or commit the workbook. The read-only workbook can be refreshed.
When you save a workbook, you can assign one of three access permissions to the workbook:
World—Allow any user to open and edit the workbook.
Group—Allow only those users in their same group to open and edit the workbooks.
User—Allow no other users to open and edit the workbook.
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Note: A user must have access to the workbook template in order to access the workbook, even if the workbook has world access rights. |
For more information on security, see the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide for the Classic Client or the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide for the Fusion Client.
Internationalization is the process of creating software that can be translated more easily. Changes to the code are not specific to any particular market.
Oracle Retail applications have been internationalized to support multiple languages.
The RPAS platform supports associated solution extensions and solution templates.
A solution extension includes a collection of code and generally available configurations. Typically, solution extensions are implemented by a retailer with minimal configuration.
A solution template does not include code. A solution template is most typically implemented as a retailer configuration.
Oracle Retail releases the translations of the RPAS server and client, as well as strings from the solution extensions.
Translations of the solution templates are not released. Since the labels for measures, hierarchies, dimensions, and workbook templates, are typically changed by the retailer at implementation time, languages for the templates are not released. All templates have the ability to support multibyte characters.
