Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite

Release Notes

Release 18.0.002.6

F26340-02

January 2020

This document highlights the major changes for Release 18.0.002.6 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.

n User-based organizational data filtering

Retail Insights supports assigning users and groups to specific levels of the organization hierarchy to then filter the results shown in reporting based on those assignments, such as for limiting certain users to a region or store location.

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.

Location-Based Data Filtering

User-specific data filtering will be added to RI using a set of user/organization mapping input interfaces, modeled after RMFCS data security tables. The interfaces allow the assignment of users to filter groups, and then groups to specific levels of the organization hierarchy. Users mapped to specific organization levels can then be restricted to seeing only data within those areas in reports.

Supplier Item Attributes

The supplier VPN and supplier labels from RMFCS have been loaded through RDE and into RI for use in reporting on supplier-specific identifiers. These attributes are now available in the Item dimension folder of RI.

Employee Discount Markdowns

RI will begin capturing RMFCS tran code 60 (employee discount markdowns) on the Markdown Fact, along with new 'Emp Mkdn' metrics for reporting and a new Retail Type value of 'E'. Historical data for this fact will not be loaded automatically from RMFCS, and should be managed via Service Request if it is required.

Clearance Tracking for Receipts and Adjustments

RI will begin capturing the clearance status and markdown numbers for clearance items as part of the Inventory Adjustment (INVADJ) and Inventory Receipts (INVRC) facts. This data will be sourced from the Clearance dimension in RI, which requires Pricing CS or a legacy RPM system be used to populate it. Historical data for this fact will not be updated automatically, and should be managed via Service Request if it is required.

Item Location Traits

RDE and RI now capture additional item/location traits from RMFCS for Refundable and Backorder Indicators, as well as data from the Replenishment Item/Loc table (if populated). The interfaces have been streamlined to place all attributes on a single table in RI (W_INVENTORY_PRODUCT_ATTR_D) instead of the two tables used previously.

RMFCS Codes Interface

RDE and RI can now capture the full list of codes from the CODE_DETAIL tables in RMFCS, which will primarily be used by downstream applications such as Offer Optimization. The data is written to a new interface called W_RTL_CODE_D.

New Reporting Objects

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

Table 1 New Metrics
Subject Area	Object Names	Summary
Markdowns	Emp Mkdn Qty Emp Mkdn Amt + 42 Others	New markdown type representing tran code 60 in RMS (employee discounts) will have a new set of metrics.
Item (Supplier)	Item Supplier VPN Item Supplier Label	Item-supplier attributes sourced from RMFCS will be shown in the Item dimension.
Product Org Attributes	Refundable Indicator Backorder Indicator	Additional attributes from ITEM_LOC_TRAITS
Sales	Trx Count QTD Trx Count LY WTD Trx Count LY MTD Trx Count LY QTD Trx Count LY YTD Net Profit MTD Var LY Net Profit QTD Var LY Net Profit YTD Var LY	Adding sales metrics for certain variations that are standard in most areas, but were missing here.
Inventory Receipts Inventory Adjustments	All metrics, in combination with Retail Type or Clearance Markdown Number	Receipts and Adjustments may now be reported on by retail type (R and C types only) and Clearance attributes.

Noteworthy Defect Fixes

The following are the noteworthy defect fixes for this release.

Table 2 Noteworthy Defect Fixes
Defect	Defect Number
W_RTL_PARTITION_MAP_G had an issue inserting new rows	30148859
Metrics were returning wrong results with Supplier attributes when a supplier also had non-current dimension records	30558317
Half Year Name was not being populated for the first year of the fiscal calendar	30580351
Plan Forecast (PLANFC) interfaces were not properly maintaining W_UPDATE_DT column	30684858
Closed purchase orders were not being carried forward in RI after the change to make the interface incremental in a previous patch	30718154

Known Issues

The known issues described below remain in this release.

Table 3 Known Issues
Defect	Defect Number
PO amounts are showing as doubled when a pack item has multiple origin countries	30728531
Multiple seasons/phases added to an item in RMS at the same time can cause the RI batch to fail	30650978
OBIEE report copy link should work without Adobe Flash	30591768
Sales and Return Trx Count metrics do not work with the Time of Day dimension	30549090
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
Uploaded Excel files (XSA datasets) are not being preserved across patches, forcing the user to re-upload the file after upgrade	30640798

Documentation Accessibility

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Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

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Access to Oracle Support

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Oracle Retail Insights Cloud Service Suite Release Notes, Release 18.0.002.6

F26340-02

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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.