Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Release Notes

Oracle® Retail Assortment Planning

Release Notes

Release 14.1.1

May 2015

The assortment planning process establishes the breadth and depth of the product offering (including the color/fragrance/flavor and size level), for Points-of-Commerce (stores, sites, applications, catalogs, social commerce networks, whole-sale/franchise locations/groups, and so on) and for a given period of time. The analysis of past performance such as color effectiveness, trend adoption, size preferences, customer segmentation, styling visualization, in-store placement, and geographic selling are key inputs into revising a currently planned/executed assortment or building a new assortment.

Assortment Planning is a role-based solution enabling each role (Senior Merchant, Buyer/Trader and Planner, and so on) to use the solution to develop, record, and track their assortment decisions and strategies. A role-based user can do the following:

n Decide the breadth and depth of the assortment by Point-of-Commerce (stores, sites, applications, catalogs, social commerce networks, whole-sale/franchise locations/groups, and so on).

n Identify the number of styles or items and the number of options (colors/fragrances/flavors) per assorted style or item.

n Evaluate both the sales/margin potential as well as the sales/inventory capacity for a single or group of Points-of-Commerce.

n Create a shopping list for your use when going to market, meeting with designers/vendors, reviewing Look Books, and so on, that can be used to flesh out the assortment as you make decisions.

n View the look and feel and of the assortment from the customer's perspective as a collection and at the detail level.

n Determine where to make receipt and inventory investments in the assortment.

n Create a buy plan (sales, margin, inventory, receipts, and sell-thru) to guide the execution of the assortment and to track its results.

n Align the assortment plan with the Merchandise Financial Plan (MFP) and/or Location Plan (LP).

n Re-trend the assortment plan to make in-season assortment decisions.

n Assign the color runs (or fragrance of format groups) to be carried for each style/item.

n Set up (if not using Oracle Retail Size Profile Optimization (SPO)) or review size and pack profiles to be used when executing the assortment in each Point-of-Commerce.

n Use Oracle Retail Science to convert the Buy Plan's receipt quantities into a style-color-size receipt plan in eaches and/or in pre-packs.

n Use the Weekly/Historical analysis to apply what you have learned from in-store and prior assortments when creating new or revising planned assortments.

n Execute assortment decisions through the packaged integration.

There are several processes by which an assortment can be established in this solution:

n Collaborate with internal design teams to develop house brand assortments.

n An initial super-set is supplied by Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions:

- Then choose from super-set of options in AP.

n Select options and request adjustments be made from an assortment offered by third-party vendors.

n Create a global assortment from which each regional business unit selects a subset to carry in their region.

n Omni-channel—Where a user identifies a super-set of assortment options and then determine which options by location will be available for the following:

- Both sale and fulfillment

- Order creation only (and potentially for demonstration/trying on)

- Fulfillment only

All of the Oracle Retail Planning solutions are highly configurable to enable each retailer's assortment business-specific, successful business methods to be embedded in the solution and business process. Oracle Retail has identified several keys to success with the Assortment Planning solution, including:

n Align with the Merchandising Plan - The Assortment Plan must be aligned with the Merchandise Financial Plan (MFP) and/or Location Plan (LP) to insure the inventory investment required to support the Assortment Plan is financially viable and risk approved (AP offers packaged and configurable integration that links assortment plans to financial plans).

n Process Flexibility - Assortment planning processes vary widely within each retailer and across retailers. The business process must be flexible so that merchants can keep current with fashion trends, market shifts, economic changes, and customer preferences.

n Build the assortment in layers - Build and view the assortment in attribute-based layers. Evaluate the assortment by brand, color, color family, fabric, silhouette, fit, length, embellishment, trend, and so on, and compare the prevalence by attribute to recent trend, last season, last floor set, customer panels and social network, or Endeca search results.

n Plan the full lifecycle - Plan the entire lifecycle, from launch to normal selling to clearance and exit. (The AP solution plans the entire life of the assortment and integrates with its promotion and clearance pricing solutions to maximize the assortment's profitability.)

n Plan the assortment visually. Because customers do not shop from a spreadsheet, Oracle Retail believes that merchants should not have to plan the assortment with only a spreadsheet. Oracle Retail's Assortment Planning solutions enable the merchant to view the assortment from silhouettes at the beginning to finished goods at the end.

n Plan once and execute everywhere - Be able to make a decision in Assortment Planning and execute it everywhere without manual reentry of the decision in multiple solutions. The Oracle Retail Assortment Planning solution can, depending on the implementation, integrate data with the Oracle Retail Merchandising System, as well as, Oracle Retail’s Planning, Clearance Optimization, Size/Pack Optimization, and Allocation/Replenishment solutions.

Note

See the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Installation Guide for compatible integrated Oracle Retail applications.

These same integration options, as most are configurable, can be used for integration with non-Oracle solutions as well.

Note

Because AP uses the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS) platform, Oracle Retail recommends that you review the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Release Notes for fixed and known issues that may affect AP.

In addition, RPAS 13.3 and later releases have significant technical enhancements related to hierarchy management (such as integer indexing) that have an effect on the configuration and maintenance of AP. You must upgrade to key RPAS versions and complete the upgrade process as described in the chapter, "Patch Installation," in the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Installation Guide before upgrading to a 14.1.1 AP domain.

Overview of the Fashion Planning Bundle

The Fashion Planning Bundle is the integration of Item Planning (IP), Item Planning configured for Clearance Optimization Engine (IP-COE), Assortment Planning (AP), Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP), and Size Profile Optimization (SPO) as a full-suite planning solution for fashion retailers.

Hardware and Software Requirements

See the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Installation Guide for information about the following:

n Hardware and software requirements

n Oracle Retail application software compatibility information

Functional Enhancement

The following functional enhancement is included in AP 14.1.1:

Time Phase the Wedge

This feature was introduced in the 14.1.0.4 hot fix release. Functionality is added in 14.1.1 that allows the creation of a time-phased view of the assortment wedge. This is executed using a custom menu option, Time Phase the Wedge. This custom menu creates the time-phased view of the wedge, which shows images of the products in the look for the product's active lifetime, and is ordered so that items with the largest buy quantity (WP Buy Qty) are shown on top.

Two time-phased views of the assortment are available:

n Time Phased View (by Look): View the style-colors in the assortment, sorted on the basis of a performance parameter, by Look.

n Time Phased View (by Week): View the style-colors in the assortment sorted on the basis of a performance parameter, by Week.

For more information, see the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning User Guide for the RPAS Fusion Client.

Noteworthy Defect Fixes

The following noteworthy defect fixes are included in AP 14.1.1:

Fixed Issue/Defect	Defect Number
The Allocation algorithm, as part of the prepack procedure, returned the wrong results for eaches. Receipts (eaches) were miscalculated in the prepack procedure.	12830565
In Look Maintenance, when RPAS calculated the look duration in days, if the look start or end date was beyond the domain calendar boundaries, RPAS was not able to correctly calculate the look duration. The issue is fixed by providing a real time alert if the user selection is beyond the domain calendar range.	19446469
The Current Plan (CP) measures were not committed when approve allocations was done in the Optimize AP Size/Pack Allocations workbook. The Approve custom menu did not commit the CP measures when run, so the Working Plan (WP) measures were not committed to the CP measures as expected.	19653998
Price needs to be included in the Product Attribute hierarchy in order to see the Sales by Price tier and be able to assign customer segments to Price tiers. This was removed from the Product Attribute hierarchy because the Price tier is calculated for each style/style-color in the Shopping List/Wedge and the Product Attribute Value was editable. It was determined to not have it be both calculated and editable.	19931731
The AP/SPO interface did not have the correct base intersection for the SPO files.	19950339
Sales data was generated beyond the style-color selling end date in the Buying Plan. When a style-color's selling end date was earlier than the look end date, sales data was generated from the style-color selling start date to the look end date. This was incorrect. The sales plan should generate data from the style-color selling start date to the style-color selling end date.	19978706
Due to issues with the Gurobi library, the Populate the Wedge feature did not work with HP-UX Itanium. To resolve this issue, Gurobi recompiled their libraries.	20079474
The Spread Plan custom menu generated negative sales if carryover sales were more than reg+promo. To fix this issue, a real time alert is included to notify the user that carryover sales reg+promo R/U is greater than the planned subclass level sales reg+promo R/U.	20239101
The attribute to subclass assignment did not get updated in Shopping List or Wedge unless the user approved Look Maintenance and Clustering. This issue is resolved by moving the Determine Attributes Eligibility worksheet from AP Setup to the Look Maintenance workbook. The Boolean defined and then committed, using the commit custom menu, sets the prerange to add/remove the attributes from the planning workbooks.	20292502
Currently, the style-color level silhouette image is configured as a dimension attribute in the wedge, and the style silhouette image is available in the Shopping List. The style silhouette image is added in the Wedge workbook.	20305303
When changing the total sales, the changes should be spread proportionally to reg+promo sales and clearance sales. But in the solution, the changes are applied to only reg+promo sales, while clearance sales remain the same.	20305508
In the Buy Plan, Sales Net Cust Return U was not equal to Sales minus Cust Return U. The rule logic is updated to ensure that Sales Net Cust Return U/R is equal to Sales U/R minus Cust Return U/R.	20305924
In base_importlist.txt, the measure Apdvskupoldb appears twice. It should appear just once.	20511969
The Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Implementation Guide for release 14.1 stated that the ap_batch.ksh batch script runs four rule groups: Batch_GB, Batch_WP_Update, Batch_Inv_Flow, and Curve_Calc. However, the script did not run Curve_Calc. This issue is fixed by adding a call to Curve_Calc in the script across the local domains.	20519629
Receipt U gets lost in certain situation after approving the Buy Plan. Approval transition to full calculation process was clearing the Receipt U values if the Receipt R was not manually planned. The fix for this issue is to automatically calculate Receipt R using Price with the planned Receipt U during the Create Receipt custom menu rules. If a customer is planning the Receipt U manually without using the Create Receipt custom menu, the customer needs to plan the Receipt R and Receipt AUR.	20722628
There is no data in the PoC plan when data is loaded rather than being planned directly in the PoC Target workbook. Rules are now included to add the Lp CP Reg and Promo data in the batch in case the client is not using the PoC Target workbook.	20779145

Known Issues

The following table contains known issues that have been identified for the current release:

Known Issue/Defect	Defect Number
After a Buy Plan is approved, the New style-color becomes Carryover in Build the Wedge. This is not working as designed. This issue might be due to the calculation of Carryover Sales and/or Status.	20258000
Performance of the Commit Plan custom menu option in the Look Maintenance workbook is sub-optimal.	20321146
Performance of the Approve Clusters custom menu option in the Clustering workbook is sub-optimal.	20321152
There are a few issues in exportToIP_noODI.ksh: undefined environment variables, persistent domain list files created unnecessarily (could be generated as needed), and error in exporting the bph1skupenddt measure.	20777548
exportToPPK.ksh has references to environment variables AP_ERR_DIR, AP_DOMAINPATH, and LOGLEVEL, but these environments are not defined. As a normal convention for RPAS applications, application-specific environment variables should be defined in environment.ksh.	20777648
The AP Maintenance Assortment Setup workbook cannot be created due to an IllegalParse:attributePickListExpr execution failed error in the client.	20861195

Related Documentation

For more information, see the following documents in the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Release 14.1.1 documentation set:

n Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Implementation Guide

n Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Installation Guide

n Oracle Retail Assortment Planning User Guide for the RPAS Fusion Client

For more information on the Fashion Planning Bundle applications, see the following documentation sets:

n Oracle Retail Assortment Planning documentation

n Oracle Retail Item Planning documentation

n Oracle Retail Item Planning Configured for COE documentation

n Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning documentation

n Oracle Retail Size Profile Optimization documentation

For more information about the RPAS Fusion Client, see the documents in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server documentation set.

Previous Releases

For information on previous Oracle Retail Assortment Planning release enhancements and additional information, refer to the release notes and documentation that accompany the previous release.

Documentation Accessibility

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Oracle® Retail Assortment Planning Release Notes, Release 14.1.1

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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.