Oracle® Retail Regular Price Optimization

Release Notes

Release 14.1.1

 

 

Oracle Retail Regular Price Optimization (RPO) assists retail price managers in pricing hard-line and grocery items. It is suited for long lifecycle items with infrequent price changes. It recommends permanent prices based on initial estimates of an item’s total sales volume over a planning period and on price-related sales of items and related items.

RPO includes grouping in its pricing analysis because it considers cross-item elasticities; that is, RPO considers how price changes for one item may affect the sales volume of other items. Users can input objective functions and pricing constraints that define the optimization problem. Once these inputs are defined, the pricing optimizer recommends prices. Multiple scenarios can be created and evaluated side by side, and what–if analysis can be performed within the context of a pricing scenario. After analyzing the what-if results and recommended prices, the user can make a final decision to submit the recommended prices for the given set of merchandise items and locations.

RPO integrates with an application called Oracle Retail Analytic Parameter Calculator for Regular Price Optimization (APC-RPO). APC-RPO calculates self and cross-item elasticities, which RPO uses to make price recommendations. APC-RPO is a separate application with its own installer, but it is available as an additional component in the RPO installation media pack.

Note Because RPO 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 RPO. 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 RPO. You must upgrade to key RPAS versions and complete the upgrade process as described in the chapter, “Patch Installation”, in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Installation Guide before upgrading to a 14.0 RPO domain.

 

Upgrade Note

While not directly related to RPO, the 13.3 Release of Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS) has undergone a major change to simplify hierarchy administration. Full details of these changes are outlined in the 13.3 Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Release Notes. Due to these changes, configuration updates have been made to RPO, and you will need to perform additional steps to upgrade your RPO domain, such as setting dimension sizes. The upgrade to RPAS 13.3 or later for this application includes a conversion process in addition to the normal upgrade process. Details are provided in the chapter, “Patch Installation” in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Installation Guide.

Note To enable Near Real Time execution of prices during the day between RPO and Oracle Retail Price Management (RPM), or another price execution solution, refer to the Hybrid Storage Architecture chapter in the 14.1 Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS) Administration Guide for the Fusion Client.

 

Hardware and Software Requirements

See the Oracle Retail Regular Price Optimization Installation Guide for information about the following:

n        Hardware and software requirements

n        Oracle Retail application software compatibility information

Known Issues

The following table contains known issues that have been identified in this release:

Description	Defect Number
Several of the translation files have the incorrect line endings. After uploading the language files to input folder of respective RPAS solutions, use the following command from the input folder before loading any language files in a domain: find . -type f -exec dos2unix {} \;	20131274

 

Related Documentation

For more information, see the following documents in the Oracle Retail Regular Price Optimization Release 14.1.1 documentation set:

n        Oracle Retail Regular Price Optimization Installation Guide

n        Oracle Retail Regular Price Optimization Release Notes

n        Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server documentation

The following documentation may also be needed when implementing RPO:

n        Oracle Retail Planning Batch Script Architecture Implementation Guide

For more information about the Analytic Parameter Calculator for Regular Price Optimization (APC-RPO) application, see the Oracle Retail Analytic Parameter Calculator for Regular Price Optimization documentation set.

For more information about RPAS and the ODI enabled integration, see the following documentation sets:

n        Oracle Retail Enabled ODI Integration documentation

n        Oracle Data Integrator documentation

n        Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server documentation

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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.

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