Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite

Release Notes

Release 18.0.002.5

F25161-02

January 2020

This document highlights the major changes for Release 18.0.002.5 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. It delivers flexible, mobile-enabled reporting for retailers that want to leverage data-driven insights powered by retail science to improve business performance. Oracle Retail Insights supports customizable presentation objects and configurable data management, and employs a complete, open, and integrated Oracle technology stack, from storage-to-scorecard.

The Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite is deployed as one cohesive service in the Oracle Cloud and incorporates:

n Oracle Retail Home

n Oracle Retail Customer Insights

n Oracle Retail Merchandising Insights

n Oracle Retail Science Platform

Examples of Oracle Retail Science Platform capabilities include:

n Store Clustering

n Customer Segmentation

n Consumer Decision Trees

n Demand Transference

n Attribute Extraction

n Affinity Analysis

n Innovation Workbench

Oracle Retail Home serves as a single access point to applications, Oracle Retail's and others, including the Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite. Retail Home simplifies user interactions with the data and applications most relevant to user roles and empowers retailers to take informed actions with real-time insights from a central location.

The family of solutions in Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite is based on Oracle's integrated analytic technology stack, including hardware, database, middleware, and BI tools. Some notable components in this release include advanced analytic platforms like R and Python, visualization tools like Oracle Business Intelligence and Data Visualization, identity management through Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS), job scheduling with Platform Orchestration and Monitoring (POM), and extensibility with Oracle Application Express.

Main Features

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 enterprise reporting in a secure hosted environment

The Retail Insights suite comes pre-configured with user roles and security, single-sign-on across all Oracle Retail cloud services, nightly batch programs for all available integrations, and fine-tuned environment settings to optimize all reporting and data-loading processes.

n A robust data model

The 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 Rich, high-performance metadata

Retail Insights is packaged with around 7000 metrics and 1000 attributes per subject area.

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)

n Support for multiple currencies

Retail Insights supports up to five different currencies. Metrics are calculated based on user selection, with all data displayed in the chosen primary reporting currency by default.

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 user roles that leverage the Oracle BI EE security framework, which can be used to manage dashboard and report access. Application roles are provided to control access to the many functional areas within Retail Insights, such as specific roles granting access to sales or inventory metrics.

Functional Areas

The following is a summary 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 Cloud Service Suite User Guide.

Facts

n Inventory position

n Inventory receipts

n Inventory transfer

n Inventory adjustment

n Unavailable inventory

n Return to vendor

n Markdowns

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 Sales discounts

n Sales promotion

n Sales promotion forecast

n Gift card sales

n Transaction tender

n Stock ledger

n Supplier compliance

n Supplier invoices

n Trial and repeat

n Unit cost

n Franchise

n Customer loyalty activity

n Customer loyalty awards

n Customer order demand

n Customer order fulfillment

n Customer order status

n Customer order payment (tender)

n Market/consumer sales

n Purchase orders

n Store traffic

n Stock counts

n Flexible fact (for external data)

n Sales extension (for external data)

Dimensions

n Adjustment reasons

n Calendar

n Customer

n Customer segment

n Customer behavior

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

n Discount type

n Clearance events

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 minimum browser requirements.

n Google Chrome 60+

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.

Spring Batch Improvements

We have continued to improve performance and reliability of the RI batch (non-POM) framework, including the disabling of certain redundant programs and changing quarterly partition seeding to occur on Sunday instead of Monday to avoid issues during start-of-week business reporting.

Sales Extension Interface

A new interface has been added for extending the sales transaction fact with additional external data. The extension interface supports multiple sales associates on the same transaction line, allowing for more granular attribution than supported through Sales Audit. Full interface specifications can be found in the Interface Guide.

Additional Flex Fact Columns

50 additional columns have been added to the end of the W_RTL_FLEXFACT_FS interface, starting with FLEX51_NUM_VALUE through FLEX100_CHAR_VALUE (30 number and 20 character fields added). Full interface specifications can be found in the Interface Guide.

New Reporting Objects

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

Table 1 (Cont.) New Metrics
Subject Area	Object Names	Summary
Sales Extension	Sales Associate Percent Sales Extension 1-20 Char Sales Extension 21-40 Num Sales Extension 41-50 Date	51 new fields for extending the sales transaction fact with POS data and other external information about sales transactions.
Flexible Fact	External Flex Metric 51 Number through External Flex Metric 100 Value	50 more flex fields added to the existing interface for character and number datatypes.
Pricing	Price Point Indicator	The pricing attribute now supports aggregate-level reporting by price point.
Clearance	Markdown Number	The clearance dimension's markdown number attributes have been added directly to the week level inventory fact, in order to improve report performance at week level.
Error Administration	Rejected Records dashboard	A new dashboard tab has been added to the Error Administration reports, allowing for line-level visibility into rejected records that occurred in nightly batch runs.

Noteworthy Defect Fixes

The following are the noteworthy defect fixes for this release.

Table 2 Noteworthy Defect Fixes
Defect	Defect Number
Supplier dimension and inventory performance issues causing slow-running reports	30580373 30070842
Inventory reclassification job failing to complete after several hours	30580360
Half year name not populated for first year of calendar	30571609
Missing batch dependency can cause inventory as-is aggregate to not run correctly	30534815
Out of box RI reports were forcing use of Adobe Flash	30519614
Change inventory with clearance markdowns to zero out mid-week positions when a markdown changes	30081908
W_RTL_PARTITION_MAP_G as issue inserting new rows	30148859
Supplier Net Cost metrics using incorrect formula	30222737
SIL_RETAILWHOLESALEFRANCHISEFACT batch failure with incorrect multithreading	30180950
SDE_RETAILSUPPLIERINVOICEMATCHFACT batch is doing full extract on daily basis	29880062
Unavailable Inventory quarterly partitioning issue	30376801
Spring batch is encountering key field sequence number issues	30413269
PLP_RETAILPRICECORPORATEORGITDYAGGREGATE failures	30425276
Move To Clr metrics not working with Phase Desc	30453056

Known Issues

The known issues described below remain in this release.

Table 3 Known Issues
Defect	Defect Number
Poor performance using Subclass and Class Alternate attributes	29755668
Poor performance with Item Level 1 Number and BOH metrics	29667417
Metrics in the Cluster subject area are not returning the expected values.	28895329
Shifted calendar is not supported for Customer Order and Planning LY metrics.	26849408

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Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite Release Notes, Release 18.0.002.5

F25161-02

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.

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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.