Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite

Release Notes

Release 17.0.002

E98760-01

July 2018

This document highlights the major changes for Release 17.0.002 of Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite.

Overview

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

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

n Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite

n Oracle Retail Customer Insights Cloud Service (ORCICS)

n Oracle Retail Merchandise Insights Cloud Service (ORMICS)

Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite 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 Cloud Service Suite, ORMICS, and ORCICS 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.

Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite with Oracle Retail Advanced Science Cloud Services

Any number of Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Services can be combined with any number of Oracle Retail Advanced Science Cloud Services to support each retailer's unique needs and data footprints, whether they are narrow, broad, or somewhere in-between.

Features Overview

The following is a summary of some notable Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite 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 Insights As-Was (historical)

- Retail Insights As-Is (current)

- Retail 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 calendars

Retail Insights supports two variations of the fiscal calendar, commonly known as shifted and unshifted calendars, to change the behavior of LY metrics. These calendars can be customized by the retailer to align with their business practices. RI also supports the use of Gregorian calendar along with customizable LY mappings specific to Gregorian attributes.

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. Application roles are also provided to control access to the many functional areas within Retail Insights, such as specific roles granting access to sales and inventory metrics.

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 Cloud Service Suite, see the Oracle Retail Insights User Guide.

Facts

n Inventory position

n Inventory receipts

n Inventory transfer

n Inventory adjustment

n Unavailable inventory

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 Customer Loyalty

n Customer Loyalty Awards

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 Loyalty program

n Loyalty account

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

n Transaction Code

n Stock Count

Oracle Retail Cloud Services Suite and Business Agility

Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite is hosted in the Oracle Cloud with the security features inherent to Oracle technology and a robust data center classification, providing significant uptime. The Oracle Cloud team is responsible for installing, monitoring, patching, and upgrading retail software.

Included in the service is continuous technical support, access to software feature enhancements, hardware upgrades, and disaster recovery. The Cloud Service model helps to free customer IT resources from the need to perform these tasks, giving retailers greater business agility to respond to changing technologies and to perform more value-added tasks focused on business processes and innovation.

Oracle Retail Software Cloud Service is acquired exclusively through a subscription service (SaaS) model. This shifts funding from a capital investment in software to an operational expense. Subscription-based pricing for retail applications offers flexibility and cost effectiveness.

Web Browser Requirements

This section provides a list of requirements.

n Google Chrome 55+

n Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 11.0

n Mozilla Firefox Enterprise Version 52+

Functional Enhancements

The functional enhancements described below are included in this release.

Subject Area Merge

RI now has only two main subject areas, named Retail Insights As-Is and Retail Insights As-Was. All metrics and attributes formerly placed in Merchandising or Customer Insights subject areas have been combined under one of these areas. In conjunction with this change, the application roles have been enhanced to provide granular access to functional groups within the subject areas (such as a separate role for Promotion related metrics). Refer to the Administration Guide for details on application roles and user management under this new framework.

Markdown Reference Numbers

RI now captures reference fields from RMS transactional data as part of the existing Markdown Fact. These reference fields may contain details about clearance markdowns initiated in Retail Pricing Management. For example, Ref Number 1 will contain the price change event ID and Ref Number 2 will contain the markdown number assigned to a clearance event (such as First or Second).

The Markdown fact provides two new attributes for reporting on this data, Mkdn Ref Number 1 and 2. These attributes will allow the user to report on clearance item activity using the data in these fields, such as limiting an item's sales and inventory data to the time it is in First markdown status.

Stock Count Dimension

A new dimension has been added for reporting on Stock Count activities. The dimension consists of a single source-independent interface which accepts a list of locations associated with a stock count activity, along with the start and end dates to use in historical reporting on the stock count. The start and end dates are used to limit existing fact data such as sales and inventory to a window of time that the stock count is relevant for, such as a 6-month period prior to a mid-year stock count. The stock count information can be sourced from an inventory management system such as SIM.

Refer to the Oracle Retail Insights Implementation Guide and Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite/Oracle Retail Advanced Science Cloud Services Data Interfaces Guide for more details on loading this interface.

Planning Attributes

RI supports the loading of Plan data against a product attribute (such as Brand), in addition to all prior product and location levels supported.

Customer Alternate Keys

RI now accepts a secondary customer identifier on the MASTER_CUSTOMER_NUM column in W_PARTY_PER_D, in order to match customer IDs coming from systems not aligned to the retailer's CRM system. This identifier will be checked when loading sales transactions, if the transaction doesn't match to the main customer ID.

Promotion Baseline Batch Processing

The batch steps for executing the Promotion Baseline functionality have been added to the default RI batch execution. These processes generate data for Promotion Lift metrics in RI.

New Metrics

The following subject areas have been enhanced with new or modified metrics:

Table 1 New Metrics
Subject Area	Object Names	Summary
Sales	Net Non-Clr Profit Net Non-Clr Profit LY Net Non-Clr Sales Amt Net Non-Clr Sales Amt LY Net Non-Clr Sales Cost Net Non-Clr Sales Cost LY Net Non-Clr Sales Qty Net Non-Clr Sales Qty LY	These sales metrics report on the sum of regular and promotional (a.k.a. non-clearance) sales for this year and last year data.
Markdown	Mkdn Ref Number 1 Mkdn Ref Number 2	These metrics expose the markdown reference numbers provided on transactional records related to markdown events. The first ref number is for the event ID and the second number is for the markdown number.
Stock Count	Stock Count ID Stock Count Desc Stock Count Type Stock Count Status Stock Count Start Date Stock Count End Date	These attributes expose the stock count schedule to RI. They can be used for reporting on fact data based on the start and end dates in the schedule.

Noteworthy Defect Fixes

The following are the noteworthy defect fixes for this release.

Table 2 Noteworthy Defect Fixes
Defect	Defect Number
Add default value and seed record for item brand	27894034
The sending email domain should be set in ra.env automatically	27694543

Known Issues

The known issues described below remain in this release.

Table 3 Known Issues
Defect	Defect Number
Shifted calendar is not supported for Customer Order and Planning LY metrics.	26849408
Deleting and recreating the exact same style in RMS may cause issues when loading the style to RI.	27051860

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Access to Oracle Support

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Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite Release Notes, Release 17.0.002

E98760-01

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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.