Oracle® Retail Insights

Release Notes

Release 16.0.2

F11611-01

November 2018

This document highlights the Release 16.0.2 of Oracle Retail Insights.

Overview

Oracle Retail Insights provides retailers role-based and prescriptive dashboards and robust science-powered insights.

Oracle Retail Insights delivers mobile-enabled insights for retailers that want to leverage data-driven insights powered by retail science to improve business performance. Oracle Retail Insights is comprised of the following applications:

n Oracle Retail Merchandise Insights (ORMI)

n Oracle Retail Customer Insights (ORCI)

Retail Insights also includes key functionality in Market Basket Insights.

This family of service solutions is based on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) and the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM), and employ Fusion-standard technology such as Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) and Oracle Advanced Analytics (OAA).

Under the product family name of Oracle Retail Insights, ORMI, and ORCI provide:

n Coverage of merchandising, commerce, planning and supply chain domains

n A 360-degree view of the customer

n A consistent analysis of a customer's entire Commerce Anywhere experience

n A retail-specific historical analytical data repository and business intelligence (BI) metadata that is consumable by operational and planning applications

n The ability to subscribe to Oracle's common enterprise information model for cross-domain analysis, including: Retail and enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM)

Oracle Retail Insights supports customizable presentation and configurable data management, and employs a complete, open, and integrated Oracle technology stack, from storage-to-scorecard.

Features Overview

The following is a summary of some notable Oracle Retail Insights features. For more details, see the Oracle Retail Insights User Guide.

n Pre-configured in a secure hosted environment

n A robust data model

The Oracle Retail Insights data model is based on Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications and extended to support a retailer's business intelligence data needs. It is designed to maximize performance with Oracle Data Integrator and Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

n Prepackaged, high-performance integration

Retail Insights provides packaged integration with select Oracle Retail source systems through the Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) modules for extract, load, transform and aggregation processing. Parallel processing capabilities are built-in to ensure high performance, and batch shell scripts are provided for easy use with batch scheduler tools.

n Flexible aggregation

Retail Insights provides a flexible aggregation framework that can be easily customized after implementation to achieve an aggregation strategy that satisfies batch and reporting performance requirements.

n Dashboards and rich, high-performance metadata

Retail Insights is packaged with around 70 dashboards, 2000 metrics and 550 attributes.

Retail Insights metadata is built to optimize reporting performance, and it provides the following subject areas (catalogs) in the same Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) instance:

- Retail Merchandising Insights As-Was (historical)

- Retail Merchandising Insights As-Is (current)

- Retail Customer Insights As-Was (historical)

- Retail Customer Insights As-Is (current)

- Retail Customer Insights Data Mining

For more information, see the Oracle Retail Insights User Guide.

n Support for multiple currencies

Retail Insights supports up to five different currencies. Metrics are calculated based on user selection.

n Support for multiple languages

Retail Insights supports data for 18 different languages. The user interface is also translated into 18 languages.

n Role-based security

Retail Insights is packaged with sample user roles that leverage the Oracle BI EE security framework to manage dashboard and report access.

n Flexibility and extensibility

Retail Insights extract, transform, and load (ETL) and reporting logic can be customized and extended by Oracle Retail Consultants to fit retailer-specific needs.

Functional Areas

The following is a list of summaries of the functionality included in this release. Retail Insights provides a wide breadth of data to enable a detailed analysis of retail management and operations.

For more details on the functional areas included in Oracle Retail Insights, see the Oracle Retail Insights User Guide.

Facts

n Inventory position

n Inventory receipts

n Inventory transfer

n Inventory adjustment

n Markdowns

n Market basket affinity

n Net cost

n Net profit

n Planning

n Pricing

n Promotion actual

n Promotion baseline

n Promotion budget

n Sales (including wholesale)

n Sales forecast

n Sales packs

n Return to vendor

n Sales promotion

n Sales promotion forecast

n Stock ledger

n Supplier compliance

n Supplier invoices

n Trial and repeat

n Unit cost

n Franchise

n Customer

n Consumer

n Customer Order Demand

n Customer Order Fulfillment

n Customer Order Status

n Customer Order Payment (tender)

n Market

n Purchase Order

n Store Traffic

n Gift card sales

n Transaction tender

n Competitor Pricing

n Sales Discount

Dimensions

n Calendar

n Customer

n Customer segment

n Employee

n Household

n Loyalty score

n Organization

n Product

n Promotion

n Retail type

n Season phase

n Supplier

n Time of day

n Customer Order

n Location Clusters

n Consumer

n Trade Area

n Fulfillment Channel

n Demand Channel

n Market Item

n CM Group

n Purchase Order

n Allocation

n Buyer

n Comp Store Designation

n Competitor Pricing

n Coupon

n Transaction Tender

Applying the Patch Release

Before applying the RI 16.0.2 patch release, be sure that:

n RI 16.0.1 has been installed

Before applying the patch release over your files:

n Note whether any modules have been customized. If so, the customizations must be reapplied to the new version of the module, or the fix may need to be applied to the custom version of the code.

n Copy the original files to a different directory before you copy over them, in case you need to refer to them at a later date.

Running Scripts

Back up data before running any script, because the scripts provided do not preserve data. See defect reports for details.

Check with your database administrator to determine whether your database should be analyzed after a script is run. In many cases, analysis of the database is necessary to take advantage of new or modified indexes intended to improve performance of the application.

Technical Enhancements

The following technical enhancements are included in this release:

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.

ODI

Oracle Retail Insights Release 16.0.2 is supported for use with Oracle Data Integrator 12C (12.2.1.3).

Oracle BI EE

Oracle Retail Insights Release 16.0.2 is supported for use with Oracle Business Intelligence 12C (12.2.1.3).

Fusion Middleware Support

Oracle Retail Insights Release 16.0.2 is supported for use with the following Fusion Middleware components:

n Oracle WebLogic Server 12.2.1.3

n Oracle Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Server 12.2.1.3

Bi Publisher

Oracle Retail Insights Release 16.0.2 is supported for use with BI Publisher 12C (12.2.1.3).

Browser Support

Oracle Retail Price Management Release 16.0.2 is supported for use with the following browser:

n Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release 54+

Defect Fixes and Documentation

Note

The user interface (UI) of this application was developed using the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF). Because the resulting code is closed to modification, defect documents are not being provided for this line of code. For additional information, contact Customer Support.

Noteworthy Defect Fixes

The following defect fixes and enhancements are included in RI 16.0.2. This is not a complete list; see the cross-reference spreadsheet and defect reports for a complete list and full details.

Table 1 Noteworthy Defect Fixes
Defect Number	Summary
27267226	SIL_RETAILPOONORDERFACT generation fail with nullpointerexception
27374961	SIL_RETAILCOLINETRANSACTIONFACT fails - km xkm sql join when generating source
27444940	Getting the error ORA-00911: INVALID CHARACTER while creating the view
27912472	SIL_RETAILITEMDIFFDIMENSION_SIZE job is failing with unique constraint error
28185414	Misleading transfer in/out information for location
28479365	SIL SEED is failing error while refreshing variable

Supplemental Training

The following documents are available through My Oracle Support. Access My Oracle Support at the following URL:

https://support.oracle.com

Transfer of Information (TOI) Material (ID 732026.1)

For applicable products, online training is available to Oracle supported customers. 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.

Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible to all users, including users that are disabled. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Accessibility standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. 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.

Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

Screen readers may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, some screen readers may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.

Accessibility of Links to External Web Sites in Documentation

This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle does not own or control. Oracle neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites.

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 Insights Release Notes, Release 16.0.2

F11611-01

This software and related documentation are provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and are protected by intellectual property laws. Except as expressly permitted in your license agreement or allowed by law, you may not use, copy, reproduce, translate, broadcast, modify, license, transmit, distribute, exhibit, perform, publish, or display any part, in any form, or by any means. Reverse engineering, disassembly, or decompilation of this software, unless required by law for interoperability, is prohibited.

The information contained herein is subject to change without notice and is not warranted to be error-free. If you find any errors, please report them to us in writing.

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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.