1 Noteworthy Enhancements

This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in the Oracle Retail Analytics and Planning applications update and describes any tasks you might need to perform for the update. Each section includes a brief description of the feature, the steps you need to take to enable or begin using the feature, any tips or considerations that you should keep in mind, and the resources available to help you.

Column Definitions

Analytics and Planning Enhancements

Integration and Interface Updates

This release of Retail Analytics and Planning (RAP) applications includes the following updates to data integrations:

  • The item integration from the AIF data warehouse to the Planning Data Store (PDS) has a new option to allow non-sellable items on the W_PDS_PRODUCT_D interface. By default, this option is disabled to align with current behavior. When enabled, both sellable and non-sellable items are integrated to PDS without any restriction.
  • The AIF DATA standalone process LOAD_PLANNING5_DATA_ADHOC has been updated with COPY and STG jobs to load the plan data from a file instead of directly from Assortment Planning (AP), when AP is not being used and you need to perform an ad hoc load of plan data.
  • The AIF DATA batch schedule has been updated with a new job RDE_CHECK_GGH_STATUS_JOB which verifies the status of data replication between Merchandising, Customer Engagement, and RAP. If the data replication processes are not active or have an error status, then this job will fail.

AI Foundation Cloud Service

Preprocessing Review UI

AIF was enhanced to allow the review of sales preprocessing. The preprocessing step is correcting for outside factors and transforms sales in unconstrained demand before becoming the forecasting data source.

Estimation Review – Promotions

AIF was enhanced to allow the review of the impact of promotions on demand. The impact can be viewed by offers and promotions, and can be sliced and diced by different levels on the product and location hierarchies.

Ability to Sync Application Labels from Retail Home

AIF was enhanced with logic to automatically populate flexible groups. Grouping item/location combinations with similar lifecycles captures relevant demand patterns and produces more accurate forecasts.

Inventory Planning Optimization (IPO) Cloud Service-Inventory Optimization Enhancements

Use Supplier Minimums in Auto Approval

Supplier foundation data captures supplier-related inventory management parameters such as supplier minimums. A supplier minimum defines the minimum threshold a purchase order must meet to be considered for automatic approval. Purchase orders not meeting the minimum will remain in IPO requiring user review before being exported. Supplier minimums must be configured in Merchandising Foundation CS and integrated to IPO before they can be applied.

Override Recommended Allocate Quantity

A new field has been introduced to allow the inventory planner or allocator to enter an override quantity that will be used in place of the system recommended allocation quantity. The total quantity allocated must not exceed the quantity available.

Export Approved Allocations

User-approved allocations can now be exported to Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service in real time.

Preview and Resolve Alerts in Time-phased Plan

Generating a time-phased preview will now evaluate alerts for the preview, so you can see if the parameters changes have resolved alerts or introduced new inventory issues.

When a new time-phased plan is published, the alerts are reevaluated to give you the most accurate view of inventory issues.

Support Cross Dock Lead Time in Optimized Min/Max

Optimized Min/Max parameter calculation will use both warehouse and store lead times.

Custom Export Job in Intra-Day Batch IPO

A hook is added to the intra-day batch to allow the export of custom measures. For instance, when a manual transfer is performed, users may want to add comments and send them to downstream applications such as Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service. While the export of transfers are GA functionality, the export of the comments are leveraging this functionality.

Lifecycle Pricing Optimization (LPO) Cloud Service Enhancements

LPO Rules-Based Regular Pricing Optimization

LPO has been enhanced to support regular pricing strategies by leveraging rule-based pricing to generate price recommendations based on predefined rules and strategies. To activate this, set RSE_CONFIG .PRO_LPO_REGULAR_LITE_ENABLED_FLG to Y.

Key capabilities include:

  • Rules-based pricing recommendations triggered by factors such as cost changes, margin adjustments, competitor pricing, and so on.
  • Separation of business rules based on Forecast-Based (requiring historical data) vs. Non-Forecast-Based. When the PRO_LPO_REGULAR_LITE_ENABLED_FLG flag is set to 'Y,' forecast rules will be hidden.
  • Business rule violations for soft constraints will be shown in the UI.
  • Daily batch processing to update input data extracts.

Clearance Failure Status in LPO

When LPO is integrated with RPCS, the system now displays the ‘Export Failed’ status in the LPO screen for failed clearance webservice responses.

Retail Insights Cloud Service Enhancements

Regular Price Optimization Ratio Forecast

A new reporting folder will be added in the Retail Insights As-Is subject area containing data from Regular Price Optimization’s (RPO) demand forecast metrics. The metrics for this folder will be sourced from the PMO_RPO_RATIO_DMD_FCST table.

Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition Server Enhancements

Ability to download Reports from BI Publisher OAS to RPAS

This integration allows the customer to download Reports from BI Publisher OAS OS into RPAS using batch. Batch control files in RPAS have been enhanced to support this functionality. Configuring batch control provides the ability to pull files from OAS OS using OAT or POM. The batch service copyfromBI is the service introduced to download files in RPAS OS from BI publisher OAS OS.

Retail Predictive Application Server Client Enhancements

Improved Export to Excel – Ability to Export All Slices into a Single Excel Sheet

The Export to Excel feature has now been enhanced to export all the slices into a single Excel sheet with each slice becoming a tab in the Excel sheet. This allows the user to download all the slices into a single sheet to save all the plans locally in one sheet and also allows better collaboration with other teams while sharing the plan.

Uncommitted Badge Removal when Commit Rule is not Configured

Workspace usability has been improved by removing the uncommitted badge if the workspace does not have commit rules defined. This badge will appear only if there is uncommitted data in the workspace. When the user executes a custom menu or chooses to close the workbook to commit the data, the uncommitted badge will disappear.

Oracle Digital Assistant

Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) is a chatbot supporting natural language interactions and uses machine-learning to respond to user questions in English. In this release, the chatbot will be able to respond to questions concerning application functionality. Users can assess the responses they receive by pressing thumbs up or down, which will be used to improve this functionality. ODA appears as a chat icon within the UI. ODA will be enabled for Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) and Assortment Planning (AP).

Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service Enhancements

Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) Integration with Portfolio Optimization

With this release, users can now utilize Portfolio Optimization output in MFP to make decisions for business growth. Users can seed the MFP plans with Portfolio Optimization output to have a base line for initiating the plan. This option is available for the Merch Target and Merch Plan templates.