Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite

Release Notes

Release 17.0.004

F10058-01

September 2018

This document highlights the major changes for Release 17.0.004 of Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite.

Note

Release number 17.0.003 was skipped.

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 55 dashboards, 4500 metrics and 800 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.

Automatic Input File Creation

RDE and RI now generate zero-byte files for any optional input file that is not provided for a daily batch cycle, such as planning data or comp statuses. Required files such as Product and Location are not automatically created and must be provided to RI.

Promotions from Customer Engagement

W_RTL_PROMO_CE_DS. This file should be uploaded as part of the RI_CE_DATA.zip package. It will be loaded into RI's existing Promotion Dimension tables. The configuration to enable and send this file will occur during CE export implementation.

Promotions with Reusable Deals

RDE and RI are now leveraging the Promotion ID and Promo Component ID from the RDWT interface to perform a two-column join on the Promotion dimension (previously only the Component ID was used). This allows for promotions that have duplicate or shared deals (such as those used in CE) to be credited with the correct promotional sales transactions.

If the RTLOG interface to ReSA is populating the promotion or component IDs with anything other than valid promotions or null values, then updates may be required to ensure the sales can be loaded to RI while satisfying this new join condition. This only applies to discount types other than 9999.

Price Zones

RDE and RI now support loading of Price Zone data from RPM into the Store Cluster interfaces. This will require RDE 17.0.001.3 patch or later, and the new program should be included in the JOS/POM schedule.

Stock Count Facts

A new fact has been added for stock count activities, covering data such as pre-count inventory snapshots and approved count quantities. Two interfaces are provided for capturing inventory details from a systemic inventory system (e.g. RMS) and a perpetual inventory system (e.g. SIM). The RMS interface can be populated automatically using RDE, while the SIM-style interface must be manually loaded to RI.

Default LY Calendar Mappings

Programs have been added to populate the shifted/unshifted calendar tables with 4-5-4 LY mappings for all available calendar years. Any desired changes to the standard NRF calendar mappings can be manually created and uploaded to the existing staging table interfaces.

Custom Metric Relabeling

It is now possible to override the default labels on RI's metrics and attributes by providing a file containing the custom labels and descriptions. This data can be provided to the customer as a list of records to update, which can be modified and returned to RI for updates.

New Metrics

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

Table 1 (Cont.) New Metrics
Subject Area	Object Names	Summary
Inventory Position	Weekly Avg Inventory Clr Cost/Qty/Retail Weekly Avg Inventory Non-Clr Cost/Qty/Retail	Clearance/Regular versions of the existing Avg Inventory metrics have been added
Inventory Position	Move To Clr Cost/Qty/Retail	Metrics which display EOH inventory that has moved into clearance status.
Inventory Position	Item Counts (3 metrics) Store Counts (2 metrics)	Dynamic count metrics based on a session variable threshold against inventory.
Inventory Receipts	Newness % Non-Clr Newness %	Metrics for measuring the amount of new inventory introduced into beginning stock on hand.
Return to Vendor	RTV Clr/Non-Clr variations (12 metrics)	Clearance and regular versions of existing transfer metrics.
Inventory Transfers	Transfer Clr/Non-Clr variations (12 metrics)	Clearance and regular versions of existing transfer metrics.
Inventory Adjustments	Adjustment Cost Value LY Adjustment Retail Value LY Adjustment Units LY	Added last-year versions of adjustment metrics.
Pricing	Original Price Price Point Indicator	Two metrics for returning price information based on the price change events from RMS.
Sales	Net Non-Clr Sales To-Date variations (48 metrics)	To-date sales metrics added for reporting on regular+promo sales, using the "non-clr" nomenclature.
Sales Promotion	Pro Savings % Net Pro Profit % Gross Pro Profit % Net Pro Sales Cost Gross Pro Sales Cost	Derived metrics for common calculations performed on promotional analyses.
Transaction Tender	Gross Tender Amt Return Tender Amt Gross Tender Amt LY Return Tender Amt LY	Added the ability to report separately on Gross and Return tender amounts.
Planning	Metrics for added flex columns (~240 metrics) Calculated metrics (~250 metrics)	New metrics have been added aligning with the added DB flex columns, and adding default MFP calculations.
Promotion	Flex metrics (10 metrics) Coupon Code Target Name	Exposed the existing database flex columns to OBIEE, and added two new metrics for potential inputs from CE.
Pricing	Price Price Diff LY Price LY Base Cost (Price) Base Cost (Price) LY Multi Unit Price Std UOM Price	Pricing metrics have been adjusted by merging the "Average Price" formulation into all other metrics and removing the Average Price, which became redundant. All price metrics should now properly aggregate to higher calendar levels, while taking the average across item and location dimensions.

Noteworthy Defect Fixes

The following are the noteworthy defect fixes for this release.

Table 2 Noteworthy Defect Fixes
Defect	Defect Number
Positional facts will now handle re-seeding of records due to a change in exchange rates	27796939

Known Issues

The known issues described below remain in this release.

Table 3 Known Issues
Defect	Defect Number
RI info tiles are not functioning due to missing JRAF libraries	28483527
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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Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite Release Notes, Release 17.0.004

F10058-01

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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.