There are two different types of reporting used in the Oracle Retail Merchandising System, each of which are used for different purposes for a retailer. The first are referred to as Operational Insights. These types of reports embed exception management into the application through the use of dashboards and contextual business intelligence (BI). Dashboards are role-based and focus on key areas of a retailer's business most useful and interesting for a user in that role. They read real-time from the Merchandising database to flag action items and work flows that may need a user's attention and provide quick actions for the user to resolve issues, such as approving one or more purchase orders, or drill into a transaction in-context to review details and take additional actions. Contextual BI is used to provide additional information to the user while in an application screen to assist in decision making.The second type of reports are operational reports that are used for specific functional purposes as required. Often for these types of reports, the information in the report needs to be shared with other parties, such as the report of purchase order details that can be sent to a supplier when placing an order. These reports are available using BI Publisher and accessed from the main Merchandising task list, based on user's privileges.