Administration Process

The intent of this document is to guide a Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service (MFP CS) Administrator to perform the recurring administrative activities for the MFP CS application. This document outlines all administration activities required to support a live MFP CS application. In some cases, the detail will be explained in this document, and in other cases, the process will be covered here and details will be explained in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition Administration Guide.

The MFP CS Administrative activities can broadly be classified into two categories. This document follows these categories and provide details for the tasks within them.

Regular Activities:

MFP Batch Task Administration
Patch/Install Domain

Ad-hoc Activities:

User and Role Maintenance
Monitor Domain Performance

Regular Activities

Once a MFP CS solution is live, the Administrator is responsible for two key activities that occur on a regular basis. The first of these activities is managing the weekly/daily batch which loads and exports data required for the MFP CS users to create, manage, and share their merchandise financial plans. Internally, it also does the calculations for necessary data aggregation.

The MFP CS Admin task offers a broad range of options to the Administrator to configure the batch run and maintenance. This document also provides a concise view to the Administrator on troubleshooting when the batch fails or diagnosing rejected records, importing/exporting of data files, reading logs, and modifying the scheduled batch to work around system maintenance or patch periods. The Administrator can also decide to run the export of data exclusively without running a weekly/daily batch.

Patch uptake is another recurring task that an Administrator needs to be familiar with. This document walks through the process of taking a monthly patch and the specifics the Administrator needs to take care of.

Ad-hoc Activities

The Administrator generally comes across certain jobs on an as-needed basis. For example, the need occasionally arises to do the following:

Add a new user who just joined the team/organization and needs to use the MFP CS application.
Remove an existing user who has left the organization and needs to be removed from the MFP CS environment.
Manage a user's access when the role changes within the organization.

This document describes the necessary actions to achieve this kind of request.

The Administrator can leverage the standard Online Administration Tools (OAT) tasks on an ad-hoc basis without scheduling the task daily or weekly. Ad-hoc administrative activities include properly managing the reclassification of product so that planners can continue their work without interruption, monitoring domain related information to maintain system performance, loading a hierarchy* from OAT, and so on, are several jobs the Administrator needs to perform intermittently.

*Currently, Hierarchy is also referred to as Dimension for the MFP CS application.

Oracle Support

It is requested that all retailers submit Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service support requests through a single point-of-contact for each environment; the system administrator is usually designated to perform this role. For the maintenance of bulk user and roles, Oracle Support is a smart solution.

The link to use when submitting Service Requests (SR) is:

https://support.oracle.com

To learn more about how Oracle Support works, go through the following training at the My Oracle Support website:

My Oracle Support (MOS) or Cloud Support Portal for New Users - A Getting Started Resource Center (Doc ID 1959163.1)
How-to use My Oracle Support - Customer User Administrator (CUA) Role and Responsibilities (Doc ID 1544004.2)
Oracle Support Accreditation - Series Index (Doc ID 1583898.1)