8 Introducing Oracle Retail Operational Insights

This chapter introduces the role of operational business intelligence in a retail environment. It briefly describes the implementation of Operational Insights (OI) reports for Oracle Retail Sales Audit (ReSA), Oracle Retail Allocation and Oracle Retail Invoice Matching (ReIM), Oracle Retail Merchandising System (RMS) through Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF).

Operational Insights Overview

Operational Insights embeds business intelligence into the fabric of the business, intertwining it with operational processes and applications that drive thousands of daily decisions. In essence, Operational Insights merges analytical and operational processes into a unified whole. Operational Insights delivers the right information to the right people at the right time so that they can take action. This not only streamlines processes and reduces costs, but also improves service and gives organizations a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Operational Insights provides a combination of dashboard and in-context reports in the Merchandising ADF applications. Dashboard reports are role based reports highlighting the area of focus for a user and in-context reports shows on selected screens and provides further information to the task flow or entity on the screen. Major benefits of OI to the user are:

• Manage by exception

  • Dashboards highlight the areas of focus for a user

  • Help to prioritize work for the day

• Increase user efficiency

  • Resolve issues from the dashboard or

  • Take the user to the specific transaction for resolution

• Contextual decision-making support

  • Contextual BI gives additional information to aid in decision-making

  • Notify a user of a key activity being completed

• Configurability

  • Dashboards created for retailer-specific roles using Oracle Retail reports, or custom reports

  • Flexibility to use data from multiple sources

  • Dashboard filters allow users to configure their view

User Roles and Responsibilities

In the standard Operational Insights installation, the predefined reports are organized in the dashboard to facilitate role-based implementation. In each application, dashboards and reports are designed for different user roles, such as:

• Auditor and Audit Manager in ReSA

• Allocator and Allocation Manager in Allocation

• Accounts Payable Specialist and Finance Manager in Invoice Matching

• Buyer, Inventory Analyst, Inventory Control Analyst, Finance Analyst, and Data Steward in Merchandising

Operational Insights Language Options

The reports are displayed in the same language as set up in the integrated merchandise applications user preferences page. To set your preferred language access the user preferences page by clicking user name > Preferences at the top of the home page of the application.

The following languages are supported by Operational Insights:

• Chinese (Simplified)

• Chinese (Traditional)

• Croatian

• Dutch

• English

• French

• German

• Greek

• Hungarian

• Italian

• Japanese

• Korean

• Polish

• Portuguese (Brazilian)

• Russian

• Spanish

• Swedish

• Turkish

OI Accessibility Options

The reports support the accessibility mode selected in the integrated merchandise applications user preferences page. To select the user preferences, click user name > Preferences at the top of the home page.