| Oracle® Retail Category Management Implementation Guide Release 14.1 E55388-01 |
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| Oracle® Retail Category Management Implementation Guide Release 14.1 E55388-01 |
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The following information needs to be considered before implementing Category Management:
It is recommended that you have at least two years of historical sales data. Less data can be used, but the more data that is available, the better picture a retailer can obtain of category and assortment performance over time.
The following factors can affect size requirements:
SKU–number of items. An item is a specific product that a consumer can purchase. Examples include a specific model of flat screen television, or a particular size, weight, flavor, and packaging of yogurt.
Store–number of physical, internet, and other distinct retail outlets.
Product Attributes–in Category Management, every item is associated with one or more attributes. The attributes are used to construct consumer decision trees. These consumer decision trees capture how consumers in a particular segment make their buying decisions for products in a given category.
Consumer Segments–consumers with similar buying habits are grouped into segments. These segments form the basis of constructing consumer decision trees.
Category Management hosts sales data from a merchandising system, market, loyalty, and other third-party data from commercial data aggregators. During batch processing, Category Management also needs temporary data storage for intermediate results. The total data storage space requirements for Category Management are estimated to be at least double the storage space of the combined sales, market, loyalty, and other third-party data.
Partitioning is done to avoid contention for resources. Building a workbook and committing data are two processes that can cause contention.
How data is partitioned has an impact on the business process. The Category Management domain is defined as a global domain. For performance reasons, a single domain is not recommended. There should be an even distribution of users across a set of local domains.
It is recommended that the domain be partitioned above the category level, to allow several related categories to be analyzed, compared, and processed in a single local domain. This allows category planners and assortment managers to focus on relevant data sets, and does not affect other users working in other categories when building or committing workbooks.
Consider the following questions when defining the partitioning of the domain:
How do I partition to meet my business needs?
How do I partition my users?
How do I create groups of users to further partition the solution?
Domain partitioning is supported on any Product hierarchy (PROD) or Location hierarchy (LOC) dimension. These hierarchies are standard RPAS hierarchies.
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Note: The partitioning level in the Category Management configuration is Department. It is recommended that this not be changed. |
In the GA configuration, department is a dimension label. The department dimension is a regular dimension in the product hierarchy, which the customer can rename or delete. One of the major purposes of partitioning in Category Management is to allow multiple category planners and assortment managers to work simultaneously. Another, less important reason is to facilitate the parallelization of the batch process.
Formatting can be done in the configuration or the workbook after the domain is built:
Each worksheet in the Category Management configuration has a measure order as well as measure styles that have been preconfigured. The measures can be displayed in the pre-configured order through the user interface. That format can then be saved to the template.
An implementer can create generic styles for the measures and assign them to measure components or realized measures. For each measure, these styles can be overridden on each workbook template. Formatting can only be changed by using the RPAS Configuration Tools. For more information, see the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Configuration Tools User Guide.
Once the domain is built, the implementer can set up worksheet sizes and placements, exception value formatting, gridlines, and other formatting. The implementer instantiates a workbook of the template to set up specific formatting by using the Format menu. The updated format is then saved to the template so that it is available to all users for any newly created workbooks. For information on how to use the Format menu, see Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server User Guide for the Fusion Client.
Category Management workbooks contain some views that are formatted as bubble graphs. For the bubble graphs which divide the X and/or Y axes into distinct, labeled, partitions, and which contain measures displaying the calculated partition placement (such as Category Planning workbook's Analyze Category Role views), the bubble placement may not match the calculated placement due to bubble graph padding. For information on how to adjust the padding percentages as desired to synchronize the bubble placement and calculated placement, see the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide for the Fusion Client, Appendix C: Fusion Client Properties Files, Individual Graph Settings section, property axisPaddingPct.
There are two types of patches that can affect the Category Management domain:
Changes to the code in the RPAS libraries
The configuration is not affected by this type of patch. For these types of changes, applying the patch is a straightforward process.
Changes to the configuration
These types of changes can be more complex. If you have customizations in the configuration, you can use the ConfigMgr utility to determine the differences between your existing configuration and the new one. Then, you can use the utility to merge the two configurations. Any changes that cannot be applied are written to a change log. For more information, see the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Configuration Tools User Guide.
Batch scripts are lists of commands or jobs that are run without manual intervention. A batch window is the time frame in which the batch process must run. It is the upper limit on how long the batch can take. Batch scripts are used for importing and exporting data. The retailer needs to decide the best time for running batch scripts within the available batch window.
How often to upload updated sales and inventory data needs to be determined. You have to consider at what interval to load the latest sales and inventory data. It is recommended that this is done on a weekly basis.
For more information on batch scripts, see Chapter 7.
To define workbook template security, the system administrator grants individual users, or user groups, access to specific workbook templates. Granting access to workbook templates provides users the ability to create, modify, save, and commit workbooks for the assigned workbook templates. Users are typically assigned to groups based on their user application (or solution) role. Users in the same group can be given access to workbook templates that belong to that group alone. Users can be assigned to more than one group and granted workbook template access without belonging to the user group that typically uses a specific workbook template. Workbook access is either denied, read-only, or full access. Read-only access allows a user to create a workbook for the template, but the user is not be able to edit any values or commit the workbook. The read-only workbook can be refreshed.
When users save a workbook, they assign one of three access permissions to the workbook:
World–Allow any user to open and edit the workbook
Group–Allow only those users in their same group to open and edit the workbooks
User–Allow no other users to open and edit the workbook
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Note: A user must have access to the workbook template in order to access the workbook, even if the workbook has world access rights. |
For more information on security, see the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide for the Fusion Client.
Some real time alerts are pre-configured in the Macro Space Optimization task flows.
No batch alerts are pre-configured in the Category Management solution. However, users may configure alerts normally in a Category Management domain.
For more information on configuring Alert Manager, see the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide for the Fusion Client.
