Oracle® Retail Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service

Release Notes

Release 19.0

F24865-01

May 2020

This document highlights the major changes for Oracle Retail Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service Release 19.0.

Note:

Although this release has been branded as 19.0, it is based on the 19.0.002 service patch.

Overview

The Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service (A&IP FSL CS) process establishes the breadth and depth of the product offering (including the color/fragrance/flavor and size level), for Points-of-Commerce and for a given period of time. The analysis of past performance such as color effectiveness, trend adoption, styling visualization, in-store placement, and geographic selling are key inputs into revising a currently planned/executed assortment or building a new assortment. The simplified business process is automated to create and define assortments based on trend and historical data with an option to override by the planner.

The Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service process starts with Creating Assortment Strategy at the cluster level by reviewing history, defining the assortment, refining that assortment at the cluster level using build wedge, moving to Item Planning pre-season for KPIs, creating weekly sales, reconciling the plan with upstream systems, and approving the plan. Then, using the exception driven process, spreading the plan down to sizes and moving ahead with the in-season process.

Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service helps the business to anticipate and proactively manage exceptions by utilizing robust real-time alerts to highlight and focus a planner's attention on item issues that need immediate attention. In this way, the planner can manage by exception versus searching through entire data sets to locate problems, saving time and resources to focus on important issues. It also provides a dashboard, which provides a visual tool to quickly analyze fluctuations in Sales, Gross Margin, and EOP over pre-season and in-season profiles and also exceptions in the business.

The Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service activity consists of five tasks: Create Assortment, Build Wedge, Item Planning, In-Season Item Planning, and Item Planning at the store level. Create Assortment focuses on reviewing history, determining the number of options, identifying the best attributes with attribute scoring, creating placeholder positions, and creating the master shopping list at the cluster level. Build Wedge focuses on the Auto wedge process, visual planning, providing the planner flexibility to override the wedge options by leveraging science in the Demand Transference process to further refine assortments, creating a high-level buy plan, and approving the assortment. Item Planning focuses on creating a plan in advance of when the merchandise is going to be sold, and In-Season focuses on adjusting the original plan-based sales once the season has started, as well as factoring in new knowledge about the assortment, completion, promotions or other factors that were not known about during Item Planning. The Item Planning and In-Season processes also include what-if optimization for pricing decisions to assist the planner in determining optimal markdowns. For any exceptional stores, the planner has the ability to plan for those stores and break down by size for the receipts plan using Item Planning @ Store.

Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service leverages the features of the powerful Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS) platform, including visual planning, exception management, and robust What-If scenarios.

Features

Assortment & Item Planning FSL CS leverages embedded science and automation to provide an effective assortment strategy to maximize return on inventory investment. By factoring in last year or last assortment trends and attribute mix, style-color performance by location, and one-off and special buys, this solution provides a recommended rate of sale and target options count for merchants and planners to utilize as a benchmark as they work with design teams and go to market.

The wedge builder algorithm takes this customer targeted assortment and recommends the optimal number of style-colors based on the assortment strategy that best fit the item status strategy and attribute goals planned for each cluster. The Demand Transference module leverages science to further refine the assortments by recommending bestselling assortments based on similarity score, attribute weights, item elasticity, and rate of sale ensuring that the product selection reflects a unique and engaging assortment mix to promote customer satisfaction and engagement.

The inclusion of sophisticated and intelligent logic allows retailers to complete their assortments quickly and effectively, allowing for more time for collaboration to develop creative innovation to increase in-store and online traffic growth. Coupled with highly visual plan views and capabilities and simplified business process, retailers are able to effectively make informed decisions when creating an optimal assortment while understanding the overall impact that it will have to the floor set and customer experience.

The Assortment & Item Planning FSL Cloud Service in-season business process provides planners with the ability to quickly and effectively react to season-to-date actuals and trends with exception management. With one complete version of the truth through a common business process and calculations and smart starting points, planners are able to easily review and update sales, promotions, and markdown plans.

The solution also helps retailers to anticipate and proactively manage exceptions through standard real-time alerts and an interactive and user-tailored exceptions dashboard, to ultimately highlight and focus a planner's attention on key areas. The solution supports the entire lifecycle of an item, including what-if promotion and markdown planning capabilities. The price and promotion planning capabilities, by percent off or price-point, streamline the layering of events within the context of the sales, inventory and keep/add/drop assortment planning decisions to derive ideal exit and carryover strategy.

Delivering an effective assortment and item strategy that engages the customer in an Omnichannel environment requires a single view of customer, inventory, order, demand, and pricing / promotions. Oracle Retail's unified approach to planning provides a framework of best practices, without inhibiting the art of the merchant, while enabling the retailer to improve the precision and level of detail of assortment and item planning decisions through advanced analytics and science.

Benefits

Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service provides the following benefits:

Simple and highly visual assortment business process to create and define assortments based on trend, history data, customer, and attribute preferences.
Streamlined placeholder creation including like item capabilities and attribute management.
Wedge builder capabilities to generate cluster level optimized assortment recommendations.
Demand Transference functionality leveraging science to recommend the best performing assortment based on similarity score, item elasticity, and attribute weights.
Exception-driven in-season planning to manage key item performance and to break items down to Style-Color using size profiles.
What-if promotional and markdown planning capabilities.
Dashboard to analyze the ups and downs in Sales, GM, and EOP and review pre-season and in-season exceptions.
Manages the entire lifecycle of an item, including item buy planning and in-season trend analysis.
Unified financial, assortment, and item strategies. Open-to-Buy Reconciliation with merchandise financial plans.
Increased accuracy and reduced markdowns liability with promotional planning through reconciliation of bottom-up item plans to top-down financial plans, preventing overstocks.
Increased return on investment with weekly receipt flow visibility and what-if promotions planning capabilities.
Reduced markdowns and increased profits with proactive in-season item management.
A proactive approach towards business trends as opposed to reactive.

Oracle Retail Cloud Services and Business Agility

Oracle Retail Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service is hosted in the Oracle Cloud with the security features inherent to Oracle technology and a robust data center classification, providing significant uptime. The Oracle Cloud team is responsible for installing, monitoring, patching, and upgrading retail software.

Included in the service is continuous technical support, access to software feature enhancements, hardware upgrades, and disaster recovery. The Cloud Service model helps to free customer IT resources from the need to perform these tasks, giving retailers greater business agility to respond to changing technologies and to perform more value-added tasks focused on business processes and innovation.

Oracle Retail Software Cloud Service is acquired exclusively through a subscription service (SaaS) model. This shifts funding from a capital investment in software to an operational expense. Subscription-based pricing for retail applications offers flexibility and cost effectiveness.

Client System Requirements

Note:

With this release, Microsoft Windows 7 is no longer supported for the Oracle Retail Merchandise Planning & Optimization/Supply Chain Cloud Services. Microsoft Windows 10 is the only supported operating system.

The following technology is supported:

Operating system:

Note:
Oracle Retail assumes that the retailer has ensured its Operating System has been patched with all applicable Windows updates.
- Microsoft Windows 10 with Microsoft Office 2010 or 2013
Web browsers supported on Microsoft Windows 10:
- Mozilla Firefox 68+ ESR
- Google Chrome (Desktop) 79+
- Microsoft Edge 44+

Functional Enhancements

The functional enhancements described below are included in this release:

Demand Transference

Demand transference across items in an assortment is a challenge for all retailers. How one item affects the performance of another is difficult to predict and can significantly impact an assortment's performance overall. With release 19.0, the science functionality of Demand Transference is embedded in A&IP FSL so the system can generate more accurate and robust forecasts and optimize the assortments to deliver the ideal mix of styles. The built-in demand transference capability in A&IP FSL utilizes similarity scores and elasticity algorithms to refine the assortment to its optimal mix based on whether a user wants to add, remove, or swap items within the created assortment, prior to approving the assortment at the cluster level for use downstream. With this release, A&IP FSL provides visibility to the results of demand transference, details of substitutable items, as well as the ability to set parameters to optimize the assortment to meet Merchandise Financial Plan (MFP) targets.

Standard Deviation

With so many retailers and so many methods of reviewing performance, Oracle solutions provide Next practice functionality in a stream-lined workflow. With release 19.0, the ability to review the standard deviation of historical sales at both the cluster and channel levels for all styles within an assortment period has been added.

For more information, see the Oracle Retail Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service User Guide.

Clustering and Planning across Channels

While E-Commerce continues to increase in penetration in many retailer's portfolio, the assortment planning process is often similar across the direct and brick-and-mortar channels. With the ability to now cluster multiple channels within a single clustering workspace, retailers can now create assortment plans for multiple channels at the same time for each department being planned and no longer have to create multiple workspaces for each channel/cluster.

Planning the Assortment Strategy at the Cluster Level

To streamline the decision-making process for A&IP users, setting the Target Mix by Attribute is now completed at the cluster level earlier in the process, thus removing duplicate tasks, and simplifying the overall A&IP workflow.

Split Sales

The introduction of split sales functionality separates the Sales metrics in Assortment planning to be split into full price/promote and clearance buckets. This will allow for planning the optimal assortment required to achieve full price goals, rather than creating an assortment that caters to markdown selling. Inventory remaining after achieving full price/promo goals is available for the planning of clearance sales and inventory in Item Planning. Because of this feature, returns will now only be a component of Net Sales in Item Planning.

Planning Data Store

The Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition (RPAS CE) platform has been extended to include the Planning Data Store (PDS). The PDS provides a common reference point for shared measures across all RPAS CE-based solutions. This enables RPAS CE-based solutions to share updates in real time and to interact with external systems via consolidated integrations. For instance, the MFP plan is available immediately to A&IP FSL. The PDS also supports modern integration patterns, including support for database-to-database bulk data integration and on-demand web-services. These integration patterns are the foundation of native integrations with Oracle Retail SaaS solutions (such as Merchandising Cloud Services). These also simplify the integration processes of retailers as they integrate with RPAS CE-based SaaS solutions.

To set up PDS with an existing cloud service, the system administrator must follow a series of setup steps and change the integration destination to load PDS. For more information, see the Oracle Retail Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service Implementation Guide.

Retail Home

From the forecaster to planner to buyer, many retail roles involve navigating through a wealth of operational and analytical applications, drilling into KPIs, and more. Oracle Retail Home is a single access point by which retailers gain insights from their data and take actions in their applications. It consolidates access to data and applications in a role-specific manner to simplify the users' interactions with the data and applications that are most relevant to their roles. Retail Home is now pre-integrated with metrics from the RPAS CE planning applications.

Noteworthy Defect Fix

The following noteworthy defect fix is included in this release:

Affected Component	Fixed Issue/Defect	Defect Number
AP Dashboard	AP dashboard has been adjusted to show the metrics based on the split sales functionality. Split sales functionality splits the sales metric in AP into Full Price/Promo and Clearance components.	30229647

Supplemental Documentation on My Oracle Support

The following document is available through My Oracle Support using Doc ID 2492295.1. Access My Oracle Support at the following URL:

https://support.oracle.com

Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS) Cloud for Planning and Optimization / Supply Chain Cloud Services Documents (Doc ID 2492295.1)

The following types of documents are available:

Release Value Proposition identifies major enhancements, and articulates expected business benefits in an upcoming release.
Advance Release Notification provides a summary of the enhancements that are planned and defects that are scheduled to be fixed in the specified service patch.
Release Notes provide a summary of the enhancements and fixed defects in the specified service patch.
White Papers provide additional information to supplement the official documentation published for the specified releases.

Supplemental Training

The following training is available.

Oracle Retail Learning Subscriptions at Oracle University

The Oracle Retail Learning Subscription is a digital training solution for anyone on your team seeking training on Oracle Retail Products. With the learning subscription you get the key elements of an effective learning program and the conveniences of a digital format, making this training unmatched in the industry.

You get modern learning at its best, such as:

12 months of 24/7 access to a comprehensive set of high-quality videos delivered by Oracle experts.
Detailed coverage and step-by-step demonstrations.
Periodic updates for new features and product enhancements.
Flexibility to search, access, and learn about specific topics of interest.

The learning subscription enables current users to continually refresh and upgrade their product skills. It also enables new employees with a self-paced learning guide to help them quickly become proficient on Oracle Retail Products.

For training opportunities, see the following web site:

http://www.oracle.com/education

Documentation Accessibility

For information about Oracle's commitment to accessibility, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program website at http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=docacc.

Access to Oracle Support

Oracle customers that have purchased support have access to electronic support through My Oracle Support. For information, visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=info or visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=trs if you are hearing impaired.

Oracle Retail Assortment & Item Planning for Fashion/Softlines Cloud Service Release Notes, Release 19.0

F24865-01

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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.