Oracle® Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service
Release Notes
Release 16.0.027
E97164-01
May 2018
This document highlights the major changes for Release 16.0.027 of Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service.
Overview
Retailers leverage Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service (RMFCS) functionality to execute core merchandising activities, including merchandise management, inventory replenishment, purchasing, import processes, sales auditing, and financial tracking. Its Trade Management module is used to manage the import process, including automating the steps necessary to import goods, managing file exchanges with trading partners, and providing a central database of critical import order information.
Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service also includes Sales Audit and Pricing modules. The Sales Audit module evaluates sales transaction from all channels, identifying any missing, duplicate, or erroneous data and highlighting any suspicious transactions, to ensure errors are resolved so that downstream systems operate off the same cleansed sales information. The Pricing module provides the ability to define, maintain, and review price changes and clearances, as well as provides the ability to pass approved price events onto downstream selling systems for execution.
Oracle Retail Cloud Services and Business Agility
Oracle Retail Foundation 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
The following technology is supported:
Operating Systems
n Microsoft Windows 7
n Microsoft Windows 10
Browser Support
n Mozilla Firefox ESR 52+
n Microsoft Internet Explorer 11
n Google Chrome (Desktop) 55+
Functional Enhancement
The functional enhancements below are included in this release.
Search Sales Audit Transactions using Reference Fields
The ability to use certain Sales Audit reference number fields when searching for transactions has been added. Reference numbers 1-4 and 25-27 at the transaction header level have been included in the 'Add Fields' list of the Advanced Search in the Transaction Search screen.
Ability to Open a Store/Day Manually
Modifications have been made to sales audit functionality to support the manual creation of a new store/day in cases where the system did not automatically generate one because the store was marked as not open for the day. The create Store/Day process is initiated from the Store/Day Summary screen.
Handling Unmapped Transactions to the General Ledger (GL)
In the course of business, situations can arise where a GL cross reference mapping may not exist for combination of attributes (Tran Code/Location/Dept/Class/Subclass). This condition may be due to a variety of reasons, such as the addition of a new location, creation of new hierarchy elements (Dept/Class/Subclass), or an expected transaction posting to an unmapped combination.
Previously, such instances of unmapped transactions resulted in the integration failing and consequently resulted in the failure of the posting process.
Enhancements have been made to enable this process to avoid failing in cases where one or more cross reference mappings does not exist. The changes have been made to all financial posting processes in both the merchandising and sales audit areas of the system. Additionally, a notification is raised to those assigned to the Finance Analyst role to address the missing mapping issue.
Bypass Inventory Availability Check for External Transfers and Customer Orders
New system parameters have been added to support disabling the available inventory validation when processing warehouse-sourced transfers created and managed through the external interface, as well as customer orders. If these parameters are configured to disable the validation, a negative inventory position may result if the transfer or customer order quantity exceeds the available quantity for an item/location.
Customer Data Service
The RMFCS utilizes a web service provided by the Oracle Retail Integration Cloud Service to retrieve customer information for customer order and sales/return transactions. This web service is leveraged by the RMFCS when it is configured to not persist customer data.
|
Note Store-sourced externally generated transfers and customer orders are not validated for available inventory through these interfaces. |
Maintain System Date in Transaction Data Tables
With this change, the current system date (vdate) is posted to the transaction data tables along with the transaction date. These dates may differ if the transaction occurred during a time window after the calendar date has rolled, but before the Merchandising system date has changed. This additional date is being made available for reporting purposes.
Ability to Post Only Positive Debit and Credit Amounts to Financials
When financial transactions are posted into General Ledger systems, normally taking the form of GL Journals, the postings come in the form of balanced entries with the value of debit equaling the value of the credits.
For any given GL Account, there can be both Debits and Credits. Depending on the type of account (for example, Asset, Liability, Revenue, Expense, and so on), the Debits may increase the value and Credits may decrease (that is, Assets, Expense), or Credits may increase the value, and Debits may decrease the value (that is, Liabilities, Revenue).
The combination of Debits and Credits to an account results in an overall balance in the account (that is, Debits - Credits or Credits - Debits). Many GL systems allow the actual amount value for Debits and Credits to be a positive or a negative value and will factor in that sign as part of the overall calculation of the balance. Negative postings are typically only seen when there is a reversal of a prior transaction or journal. However, not all accountants or accounting departments want to use negative values in these cases. They would rather use positive Debits and Credits but reverse the Debits and the Credits instead to accomplish the financial reversal. This enhancement allows the system to be configured to only post positive debit and credit values.
Price Change Wizard
Enhancements were made to the price change functionality to allow price changes to be able to be created from the Price Change Group screen through the use of a wizard. The wizard, accessed from the Items table in a Price Change Group, walks the user through adding one or more items, one or more locations, and finally will specify the price change amounts or percentages for the selected items/locations. After that step, new price changes will be added to the existing group based on the item and location combinations selected. This provides an alternative to setting up price changes using the Quick Create panel.
Price Change with Implied Reset
In previous releases, in order for a price change to be made on an item/location that was on clearance, the item/location first needed to have its price reset to regular price, and then once that had executed, a price change could be created to give the item/location a new regular retail price. This enhancement allows for a price change to be created for an item/location that is currently on clearance, such that the price change both changes the regular selling price, as well as takes it off clearance as one action.
For point of service (POS) and order management system (OMS) integration, the price change will be sent as it previously had been, but may be received for an item/location that is currently on clearance. If this occurs, the receiving system must be able to interpret this as both a price change and a reset and set the clearance flag for the item/location to "off". This functionality can be disabled via a system option if this functionality is not supported in the POS or OMS.
Price Inheritance Rule Changes
In previous releases, when an approved item was ranged to a new location, it would default a retail price onto the item. However, the more complex process of determining the correct retail price for the item at the location was completed through an asynchronous process between Merchandising and Pricing, which also included the inheritance of future events that the new item/location would now be part of. This process has been changed in this release to decouple the initial retail assignment and the future event inheritance, such that the initial retail assignment is performed in real-time for most situations, while future inheritance remains an asynchronous process. The exception is the "Like Store" process in Merchandising that can be performed when a new store is created, which continues to process inheritance in a batch process due to volume.
Related to this change in processing, new attributes were added to the Store and Warehouse tables in Merchandising to persist the Pricing Like Location that is defined when a new store or warehouse is set up. Previously, this attribute was not retained once the new location was fully set up in Merchandising, because it is primarily used to determine the correct zones for the new location. Retaining this attribute will allow for additional flexibility in determining the price of a new item/location relationship, such as when a zone price is not available for the item to otherwise inherit. This could occur in situations where, for an existing item, the new store is moved to a new zone after creation. In this case, there would not be an established zone price for that store for the existing item. This enhancement allows for the pricing like store to be used as an alternative to just using the hierarchy markup to price the item.
Technical Enhancement
The technical enhancements described below are included in this release.
Data Access Schema (DAS) Additions
The following tables have been included in the DAS with this release.
|
Table Name |
|
|
ADD_TYPE |
ORDSKU_REV |
|
ADD_TYPE_TL |
PO_TYPE |
|
ALC_XREF |
PO_TYPE_TL |
|
APPT_DETAIL |
PRICE_HIST |
|
APPT_HEAD |
REPL_DAY |
|
BUYER |
REPL_RESULTS |
|
CALENDAR |
RTV_DETAIL |
|
CORESVC_COSTCHG_ERR |
S9T_ERRORS |
|
CORESVC_ITEM_ERR |
SA_COMB_TOTAL |
|
CORESVC_PO_ERR |
SA_FIF_GL_CROSS_REF |
|
COST_CHG_REASON |
SA_MISSING_TRAN |
|
COST_CHG_REASON_TL |
SA_PARM |
|
COST_SUSP_SUP_DETAIL |
SA_REALM |
|
COST_SUSP_SUP_DETAIL_LOC |
SA_RULE_COMP |
|
COST_SUSP_SUP_HEAD |
SA_RULE_ERRORS |
|
COST_ZONE |
SA_STORE_DAY_READ_LOCK |
|
COST_ZONE_GROUP |
SA_STORE_DAY_WRITE_LOCK |
|
COST_ZONE_GROUP_LOC |
SA_TOTAL_HEAD |
|
COST_ZONE_GROUP_TL |
SA_TOTAL_LOC_TRAIT |
|
CURRENCY_RATES |
SA_TOTAL_RESTRICTIONS |
|
CVB_DETAIL |
SA_TOTAL_USAGE |
|
CVB_HEAD |
SA_VR_PARMS |
|
CVB_HEAD_TL |
SA_VR_REALM |
|
DAILY_PURGE |
SIT_DETAIL |
|
ELC_COMP |
SIT_EXPLODE |
|
EXP_PROF_DETAIL |
SIT_HEAD |
|
EXP_PROF_HEAD |
SKULIST_DEPT |
|
FIF_GL_ACCT |
SKULIST_DETAIL |
|
HTS |
SKULIST_HEAD |
|
HTS_TARIFF_TREATMENT |
STORE_FORMAT |
|
INVC_DETAIL |
STORE_FORMAT_TL |
|
INVC_HEAD |
SUP_IMPORT_ATTR |
|
ITEM_EXP_DETAIL |
SUP_INV_MGMT |
|
ITEM_EXP_HEAD |
SUP_TRAITS |
|
ITEM_HTS |
SUP_TRAITS_MATRIX |
|
ITEM_HTS_ASSESS |
SUP_TRAITS_TL |
|
ITEM_SUPP_COUNTRY_LOC |
TICKET_TYPE_DETAIL |
|
LOC_TRAITS |
TICKET_TYPE_HEAD_TL |
|
LOC_TRAITS_MATRIX |
TRAN_DATA_CODES |
|
LOC_TRAITS_TL |
TRAN_DATA_CODES_REF |
|
ORDCUST |
TRAN_DATA_CODES_REF_TL |
|
ORDCUST_DETAIL |
VAT_DEPS |
|
ORDLOC_EXP |
WALK_THROUGH_STORE |
|
ORDLOC_REV |
WO_DETAIL |
|
ORDSKU_HTS |
WO_HEAD |
|
ORDSKU_HTS_ASSESS |
|
Integration Enhancements
The integration enhancements described below are included in this release.
Price Change and Clearance Bulk Upload
New upload processes were added to upload price changes and clearances, including resets, from an external system. These uploads allow price changes, clearance markdowns, and clearance resets to be created, updated, or deleted via a batch process. Validation is performed in a similar way to entering, updating, or deleting the events in the Pricing screens, including initiating conflict checking. However, conflict checking errors are a separate process from the load itself for events that are loaded in approved status, or loaded in submit status, if those types of events are subject to conflict checking.
MFPCS and RDFCS Integration Updates
New integrations were added to support cloud-to-cloud integration between Merchandising Cloud Services and Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service (MFPCS) and Retail Demand Forecasting Cloud Service (RDFCS). These replace the RETL flows used in previous releases. The integrations support sending foundational data, such as hierarchies, items, and calendars, as well as transactional data, such as on order and out of stock.
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 Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service Release Notes, Release 16.0.027
E97164-01
Copyright © 2018, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
This software and related documentation are provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and are protected by intellectual property laws. Except as expressly permitted in your license agreement or allowed by law, you may not use, copy, reproduce, translate, broadcast, modify, license, transmit, distribute, exhibit, perform, publish, or display any part, in any form, or by any means. Reverse engineering, disassembly, or decompilation of this software, unless required by law for interoperability, is prohibited.
The information contained herein is subject to change without notice and is not warranted to be error-free. If you find any errors, please report them to us in writing.
If this is software or related documentation that is delivered to the U.S. Government or anyone licensing it on behalf of the U.S. Government, then the following notice is applicable:
U.S. GOVERNMENT END USERS: Oracle programs, including any operating system, integrated software, any programs installed on the hardware, and/or documentation, delivered to U.S. Government end users are "commercial computer software" pursuant to the applicable Federal Acquisition Regulation and agency-specific supplemental regulations. As such, use, duplication, disclosure, modification, and adaptation of the programs, including any operating system, integrated software, any programs installed on the hardware, and/or documentation, shall be subject to license terms and license restrictions applicable to the programs. No other rights are granted to the U.S. Government.
This software or hardware is developed for general use in a variety of information management applications. It is not developed or intended for use in any inherently dangerous applications, including applications that may create a risk of personal injury. If you use this software or hardware in dangerous applications, then you shall be responsible to take all appropriate fail-safe, backup, redundancy, and other measures to ensure its safe use. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates disclaim any liability for any damages caused by use of this software or hardware in dangerous applications.
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
This software or hardware and documentation may provide access to or information about content, products, and services from third parties. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates are not responsible for and expressly disclaim all warranties of any kind with respect to third-party content, products, and services unless otherwise set forth in an applicable agreement between you and Oracle. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates will not be responsible for any loss, costs, or damages incurred due to your access to or use of third-party content, products, or services, except as set forth in an applicable agreement between you and Oracle.
Licensing Note: This media pack includes a Restricted Use license for Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS) - Enterprise Engine to support Oracle® Retail Analytic Parameter Calculator for Regular Price Optimization only.
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.