2 Pre-Provisioning

Pre-provisioning is the period after contracts are signed, but before receiving your environments, where some key activities can occur related to your upcoming implementation. For Planning & Optimization or Supply Chain cloud service implementations, your Customer Success Manager (CSM) will be your main point of contact for these activities.

Activate Your Service into a Cloud Account

You will receive an activation email from Oracle in the initial stages of provisioning, often immediately following your subscription order being booked. You will need to activate your cloud service into a cloud account in order to begin the provisioning activities for your Oracle Retail Planning & Optimization cloud services. That activation needs to be completed in order to continue forward with environment setup prior to receiving your new cloud service environments.

On activation of your cloud account, you will have access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console and the Identity and Access Management (OCI IAM) and your default Identity Domain will be created. An identity domain is a container for managing users and roles, federating and provisioning of users, secure application integration through Oracle Single Sign-On (SSO) configuration, and OAuth administration. It represents a user population in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and its associated configurations and security settings (such as MFA).

Your default identity domain will be of the Oracle Apps type. Each identity domain type is associated with a different set of features and object limits.

You can create additional identity domains. Multiple identity domains are useful when you need separate environments for a single cloud service or application (for example, one environment for development and one for production). The default approach for Oracle Retail is for a single identity domain for all environments.

Note: OCI IAM activation does NOT impact billing or the subscription service period - those details are connected to the subsequent environment delivery of the Planning & Optimization cloud services.

Activating into a New Oracle Cloud Account

Note: An Oracle Cloud Account is not the same as your My Oracle Support account. The Oracle Cloud Account exists within the OCI console and includes you identity domains for managing user access and security within your Planning & Optimization and Supply Chain cloud services.

To start the setup, click the Activate link provided in the received email. Then the following steps are required:

1. Provide the desired name for the Oracle Cloud Account.

   A best practice is to use a name which will encompass the scope of services to be managed in the account, such as a combination of your company name and "retail," for example, mystoresretail. After activation, you can adjust the displayed name for the cloud account.

2. Provide your email address as the customer administrator who receives the activation email.

   The email address must match the initial email. If you would like a different contact to be used as the administrator, this can be managed after activation in coordination with your CSM.

3. The activation success message will display, and you will receive a new welcome email with access credentials.

Activating into an Existing Oracle Cloud Account

Activate your Retail cloud service within the Account Management section of your existing Oracle Cloud Account.

1. Log in to your existing Oracle Cloud Account.

   Clicking the Activate link brings you to the login page.

2. Within the Dashboard, click the Account Management menu and then select the Activate tab.

   Available services to activate will be listed; you may need to select Show: Pending Activations.

3. Click Cloud Service Account Setup to complete setup. This setup will enable you to select the current Oracle Cloud Account as the destination for the cloud service activation.

If you have any issues with the above, see Frequently Asked Questions.

Prepare Project Team

During this time, you will also be putting together your project plan for the deployment and go-live phases of your implementation. It is important to consider the following during this planning phase to prepare your project team for the Planning & Optimization or Supply Chain implementation:

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management - As noted above, you will be using OCI IAM for user management for your Planning & Optimization and Supply Chain cloud services. During the pre-provisioning timeframe, familiarize yourself with this solution and its features.

  https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Identity/home.htm

• Project Team Training - Consider the training that the members of your team will need in order to make your implementation successful. This includes both your employees as well as your systems integration partner. Suggested training topics to consider include:

  • RPAS Configuration Tools/Starter Kit including Starter Kit VMs

  • Application Configuration

  • Dashboard Configuration

  • Integration (on-premise and other Retail SaaS), for example, the Planning Data Store (PDS)

  • Functional Business Process (current state, future state)

  • Functional User Training

• Security Configurations - During this phase, you should designate a portion of your team to become familiar with OCI IAM and the enterprise roles, duties, and privileges that will be part of the RPAS CE cloud services you are implementing. You can also start designing the roles that you will need for your users, and what duties will be assigned to your custom roles.

  For more information on OCI IAM and general role assignment, see the following documents:

  • https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Identity/users/about-managing-users.htm#understand-user-lifecycle

  • The Oracle Retail Application Server Cloud Edition Security Guide and Oracle Retail Application Server Cloud Edition Administration Guide are available in the RPAS CE Documentation Library on Oracle Help Center: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E75729_01/rpas/index.html

• Data Conversion Preparations - During this period you can start planning for the eventual data conversion by cleaning up your legacy data; purging outdated items or transactions, ensuring standardization of data, validating hierarchies (product/ location/ calendar/ attributes), and so on. You can also plan for any migrations of historical plan data and actuals.

• Extensibility Configuration Options - Your team can start reviewing the Generally Available configuration in your Planning & Optimization or Supply Chain solution to determine how the custom extensions can be used to cater to individual business processes. Work with your systems integrator to identify those you are unsure about or need to be considered in the program planning. For details on the GA configuration for each of the Planning & Optimization cloud services, see the user guide for each cloud service. Extensibility options are detailed in the implementation guide for your cloud service.

• Integration Planning - Start reviewing the available existing integrations as part of the RPAS CE Planning cloud services to support internal Oracle integrations, as well as any integrations you may need to external solutions. This will also help you identify whether you require any custom integrations. There are two sets of documents that you should review for your Planning & Optimization Cloud Services: the ones for RPAS CE, and the ones for your specific cloud service.

  The documents are available on Oracle Help Center at the following URL: https://docs.oracle.com/en/industries/retail/index.html

  Key documents to review include:

  • Administration guides - Each of the Planning cloud services has an administration guide that outlines system administration, user administration, Online Administration Tools, batches, and integrations that enables you to handle all the administration-related activities.

  • Security guide - This is intended to provide an overview of the security features of the RPAS CE Platform and applications built upon it. It contains a set of best practices for administrators, developers, and system integrators to configure and deploy RPAS CE applications and perform RPAS CE administration tasks such as user management, permissions, and system limits.

  • User guide - The user guide for each Planning application is intended for all hands-on application users and analysts. The guide describes the set of activities that must be followed as part of the workflow. It provides step-by-step instructions to complete most tasks that can be performed through the application.

• Retail Reference Library - This tool is free to all Oracle Retail customers and can be downloaded from My Oracle Support under Doc ID 2058843.2. This tool is composed of multiple parts, but the most critical to become familiar with are the Retail Reference Models (business process flows) and the Retail Reference Architecture (integration diagrams, payloads, and so on).

All Oracle Retail cloud services are provisioned with:

• Production environment

• STAGE/Non-Production environment

• Disaster Recovery environment

• Additional Non-Production environment (as applicable depending on service agreements)