| Oracle® Retail Merchandising Cloud Services Implementation Guide Release 16.0.027 E96477-01 |
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| Oracle® Retail Merchandising Cloud Services Implementation Guide Release 16.0.027 E96477-01 |
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This chapter briefly describes each of the Merchandising Operations Management applications. See the chapters that follow for more detailed descriptions.
Merchandising is the foundation system that records and controls virtually all data in the retail enterprise and ensures data integrity across all integrated systems. Merchandising includes key functions such as item maintenance, inventory management, and replenishment. This functionality provides easy access to the information that is crucial to the day-to-day merchandising activities within a retail organization, providing the ability to focus on key decisions that help achieve sales and profit targets.
Merchandising streamlines business practices and unifies business systems across retail channels to better serve customers. Because Merchandising has been developed as a Web-based, scalable product, it fully supports the large volumes found in retail, leaving more time for retailers to concentrate on the bottom line.
Oracle Retail Trade Management is an import management system designed to integrate and streamline the international trade transaction process. Trade Management links multiple departments together for all import functions. Trade Management provides immediate online visibility to the status, location, and disposition of products as they move through the import cycle.
Trade Management links partners in the supply chain-suppliers, agents, bank, transportation providers, freight consolidators, customs brokers-to share a constant flow of information needed to manage the movement of goods from the source to destination across international borders.
Because Trade Management is coupled with Merchandising, the import purchase order process also ties in with regular purchase order features such as open-to-buy, updating stock ledger, and inventory. Trade Management provides the facility to track and capture expenses incurred in the import process, and to apportion the expenses to the actual landed cost of the inventory. The application also provides letter of credit payment processing, which is typically used in import purchase orders.
Sales Audit is an auditing system that provides a simplified sales audit process that accepts raw point of sale data and provides clean data to downstream applications, while ensuring integrity of audited data. The application supports automatic and interactive auditing of the sales data. The application supports automatic and interactive auditing of the Sales Data. The application is designed to focus on the exception conditions, while allowing clean data to flow through thus increasing productivity.
Flexibility is provided in the creation of user-defined rules and totals to configure exceptional conditions. User-defined audit rules fine-tune the system to focus validation on potential problem areas, and custom totals are created online for validation of calculations such as data entry or over/short.
Interactive audit functionality allows auditors to focus on exceptions and the audit to navigate through resolution to ensure a clean data load to the integrated applications. The application validates and balances the transactions and tender data, and detects and corrects the errors according to the predefined rules. The application allows sales balancing at store/register or cashier levels. The application helps identify, review, and resolve errors and irregularities in a timely manner.
The following diagram illustrates the audit process.
The Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service Pricing module (called Pricing throughout the rest of document) is a configurable and flexible pricing solution designed to meet the varied needs of the retail industry. Pricing empowers retailers to streamline pricing strategies across the organization, yielding a more predictable and profitable outcome. It provides decision support through pricing-focused business information to validate and approve new retails and markdowns. This approach results in improved margins and strengthened productivity, all while remaining competitive.
Pricing supports the creation and management of price changes, clearances and promotions, integrating with the pricing execution systems, such as the POS in the store and e-commerce systems, to provide details on these events when approved.
A retailer's most important asset is its inventory. Oracle Retail Allocation helps retailers determine the inventory requirements at the item, store/warehouse, and week level using real time inventory information. The system calculates individual store or warehouse need based on parameters you set - whether it's the characteristics of the product, the location, or the category. The result is an allocation tailored to each destination location's unique need.
Oracle Retail Allocation allows you to allocate either in advance of the order's arrival or at the last minute to leverage real-time sales and inventory information. And when you do allocate, the system provides you the flexibility of basing your allocation on many different methods such as: merchandise sales plans, receipt plans, forecast demand and sales history.
Invoice matching is a control procedure designed to ensure that the retailer pays the negotiated cost for actual quantities received.
Invoice Matching supports the invoice verification process with accuracy and efficiency, focusing resources on exception management. Invoice Matching accepts electronic invoice data uploads through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and provides rapid online summary entry of invoices. Invoice Matching supports automated and online processes that allow one or more invoices to be matched against one or more receipts. When the cost and quantities of an invoice are matched within tolerance, the invoice is ready for payment and staged to a table to be extracted to the accounts payable application.
If a cost or quantity difference between the invoice and receipts is outside tolerance, a discrepancy is recognized and must be resolved. A flexible resolution process allows cost and quantity discrepancies to be resolved together, and also supports mass resolution of items on an invoice, or even across multiple invoices for different suppliers. Reviewers can assign one or more reason codes that they are authorized to use to resolve the discrepancy.
Each reason code is associated with a type of action (for example, create chargeback or receiver cost adjustment). Many reason codes can be associated with a particular action type, allowing more granular reporting. Actions drive document creation and EDI downloads to suppliers, inventory adjustments, and accounting activities. Actions also allow an invoice to be extracted by a retailer and posted for payment.
