Oracle® Retail Pricing Cloud Service

Release Notes

Release 16.0.029

 

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This document introduces the key features for the new Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service.

Documentation-Only Release

Note The Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service (RPCS) 16.0.029 release is a documentation-only release. There is no code associated with this release identifier.

 

Overview

Retailers leverage Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Services to execute core merchandising activities, including merchandise and inventory management, replenishment, purchasing, sales auditing, and pricing. As a critical part of this suite of cloud services, the new Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service provides the ability to define, maintain, and review price changes, clearances, and promotions, as well as provides the ability to execute the price events by passing approved price events onto downstream selling systems for execution.

Key Features

The following are the key set of features for the Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service.

Price Changes

Regular price changes allow the selling price of an item/location to be increased or decreased on a specific date. The Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service supports the ability to create these price changes at the parent item, parent/diff, or transaction item level for one or more zones or locations. A two-level approval process provides for both systematic and operational review of the price change to ensure that invalid prices, or prices out of alignment with your pricing strategy, are not sent to the selling systems.

Clearance

Clearance events, which can consist of a single markdown or a series of markdowns, are also enabled by the Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service. Like price changes, clearance events can be created for parent items, parent/diffs, or transaction items and the locations where the markdown applies can be selected by zone or individual location. This functionality also supports a similar two-level approval process. Clearance also supports resetting an item back to regular price: for example when the item is brought back again for another season.

Promotions

Promotions are a grouping of offers that detail temporary discounts to be given on customer purchases in a particular timeframe. Offers are defined by applying templates that guide the user to specify the conditions under which the customer's purchase would qualify for a reward, as well as the reward itself. Several types of offers are supported in the Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service, including simple discounts (for example, Get Y for Discount) and more complex transaction discounts (for example, Spend X, Get Discount).

Exception-based Retailing

The Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service has been built to provide an enhanced user experience through the use of business intelligence (BI)-driven workflows, user-centric design, and role-based dashboards all aimed at improving the overall efficiency of the pricing analyst. The dashboard focuses on easily surfacing pricing exceptions to the pricing analyst to help them identify and prioritize their work, ensuring that price changes are approved, with all exceptions resolved, in enough time for them to be executed in the selling solutions. Additionally, in-context reports available in the price change and clearance workflows help provide visibility to inventory and other pricing activity to help the pricing analyst in decision-making while creating and editing pricing events. A notification framework is also utilized to alert pricing analysts to exceptions when they occur in order that they can take quick actions to resolve the exceptions.

Oracle Retail Cloud Services and Business Agility

Oracle Retail Pricing 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+

Platform and Framework

Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service a web-based solution based on a Java platform built using Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF) to provide a consistent user experience with other solutions in the Merchandising cloud suite. This framework also provides shared processes and support for many of the following key functions:

n        Administration screens for setup and configuration

n        Batch and integration scheduling and monitoring

n        Security user and role management

n        Translation and accessibility

Key Integrations

The Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service is tightly integrated with the Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service to provide key visibility to users of items, costs, and inventory to help support pricing decisions. The system also executes regular and clearance price changes within the Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service to ensure accurate retail valuation of inventory.

In addition, the Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service also provides critical pricing information for regular, clearance, and promotional pricing to point of service (POS) solutions, such as the Oracle Retail Xstore Suite, and customer order management solutions.

Related Documentation

For more information, see the following documents in the Retail Pricing Cloud Service documentation set:

n        Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service User Guide

n        Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service Operations Guide

n        Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Services Implementation Guide

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

E99963-01

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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.

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