1. Release Readiness Guide
  2. Feature Summary

1 Feature Summary

This chapter describes the feature enhancements in this release.

Noteworthy Enhancements

This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Cloud Service (AP CS) 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

  • Feature: Provides a description of the feature being delivered.

  • Module Impacted: Identifies the module impacted associated with the feature, if any.

  • Scale: Identifies the size of the feature. Options are:

    • Small: These UI or process-based features are typically comprised of minor field, validation, or program changes. Therefore, the potential impact to users is minimal.

    • Large: These UI or process-based features have more complex designs. Therefore, the potential impact to users is higher.

  • Delivered: Is the new feature available for use immediately after upgrade or must the feature be enabled or configured? If no, the feature is non-disruptive to end users and action is required (detailed steps below) to make the feature ready to use.

  • Customer Action Required: You must take action before these features can be used. These features are delivered disabled and you choose if and when to enable them.

Table 1-1 Noteworthy Enhancements

Feature Module Impacted Scale Delivered Customer Action Required?

Retail Analytics and Planning Capabilities

All

Large

Enabled

Yes

Technical Architecture Enhancements

All

Large

Enabled

No

Updated Solution URLs

All

Large

Enabled

No

Redwood Theme Uptake

Usability

Small

Yes

No

Assortment Planning Leveraging AI Foundation

Assortment Wedge

Medium

Yes

No

Note:

Because AP CS uses the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition, Oracle Retail recommends that you review the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition Release Readiness Guide for information on the RPAS CE enhancements.

Reference Documents

The following documents are available on My Oracle Support in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS) Cloud for Planning and Optimization / Supply Chain Cloud Services Documentation Library MOS Doc ID 2492295.1:

  • Oracle Retail Analytics and Planning System Implementer Handbook

  • Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition User Upgrade to Release 22.x Quick Start Reference

  • Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition Administrator Upgrade to Release 22.x Quick Start Reference

Also refer to the Oracle Retail Analytics and Planning Implementation Guide and planning guides available on Oracle Help Center: https://docs.oracle.com/en/industries/retail/index.html

A Note to Existing Customers about 22.2.302.0

This move to the latest Oracle Retail architecture is not automatic and not immediately available for existing customers. AP CS environments already provisioned in the existing architecture will continue to use current processes such as SFTP and Basic authentication for REST services with no changes to your day-to-day activities. For further information or to start discussing your move, contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) or log an SR. This release is available for Merchandise Financial Planning, Retail Demand Forecasting, and Assortment Planning.

New Feature Description

This section describes the new features.

Retail Analytics and Planning Capabilities

Oracle’s Platform for Modern Retail provides retailers with the solutions and toolkits to manage their business their way. The Retail Analytics and Planning Capabilities, a part of the Platform for Modern Retail, provide an extensible delivery model for analytics and planning solutions, supporting Oracle Retail applications across each of the major analytical categories, including:

  • Descriptive and diagnostic functionality with merchandise planning, customer segmentation, and consumer insights.

  • Predictive functionality with demand forecasting, along with customer, and location clustering.

  • Prescriptive functionality with assortment planning, price optimization, and inventory optimization.

These solutions support business responsiveness through a highly interactive user experience and drive the best outcomes with the application of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

With the release of 22.2.302.0 and the unification of our planning, supply chain and retail analytics and planning capabilities, we provide a centralized data repository, lean integration APIs, and an efficient portfolio of delivery technologies. The data repository reflects a comprehensive data model of retail planning, operations, and execution processes. The integration APIs support right-time interactions: a lean set of bulk, on-demand, and near real-time mechanisms. The delivery technologies represent a portfolio of connected tools to build and extend composite solutions using fit-for-purpose analytical, application, and integration tools.

The Oracle Retail Analytics and Planning Capabilities are currently comprised of the following Oracle Retail Cloud Services:

  • AI Foundation Cloud Services

  • Retail Insights Cloud Service

  • Assortment Planning Cloud Service

  • Retail Demand Forecasting Cloud Service

  • Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition

  • Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service

  • Retail Home

  • Retail Process Orchestration and Monitoring

Technical Architecture Enhancements

In release 22.2.302.0 Assortment Planning Cloud Service will be moving to Oracle Retail’s Next Generation SaaS Architecture.

As a cloud-native service, built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, this provides higher availability, redundancy, and scalability. The services are underpinned by Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) to deliver improved database processing capabilities and superior performance.

This new architecture will yield the following benefits:

  • Solution entirely persisted within ADW-hosted Planning Data Schema.

  • Significantly reduced downtime due to fully automated deployment of all updates and patches.

  • Full adoption of OAuth 2.0 for all REST services.

  • Significant architectural improvements in middle-tier and application-tier scalability.

  • Operational improvements for application support and diagnosis.

  • Centralized Oracle Retail BI instance for easier reporting and administration.

  • Enhanced integration capabilities with other Oracle Retail products.

  • Retirement of SFTP in favor of a service-based approach.

Updated Solution URLs

If you are provisioned with a release 22.2.302.0 environment in the new architecture, the URLs used to access the services and some of the associated tools will change. The basic structure of the URLs is as follows:

https://<service>.retail.<region>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<customer_instance>/<application_context_root>

The components that vary by customer are the region and customer instance portions. Region will be based on the data center where your environment is located and the instance portion will contain an acronym for your company name along with type of environment (for example, prd, stg, and so on). The application context roots will remain the same, for example you will use “analytics” to access Retail Insights.

Redwood Theme Uptake

With this release, the AP CS application has a new interface and visual style based on the Redwood Design System. The Redwood theme has new design colors, icons, and so on. These standardize the look and feel of the Planning applications, aligning them with other Oracle Redwood-themed applications for a uniform look and enhanced usability. The following are the Redwood Theme attributes:

  • New color for the application header

  • Updated Icons for actions

  • Colors for charts

  • Updated form field style with user assistance and inline labels

  • Updates to tables and grids to enable more simple sorting

  • Additional messaging styles for various situations

See the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning User Guide and Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server User Guide for update 22.2.302.0.

Assortment Plans Leveraging AI Foundation

The Assortment Planning process establishes the breadth and depth of the product offering for different selling channels, for a given period of time. With this release, the creation of assortment plans is simplified by leveraging AI Foundation to recommend assortments based on business trends of the past, current, and future market trends recommended by forecast, item performance, current inventory and so on. With this, the planner will be able to initiate and approve assortment plans in just a few steps.

The item planning process has also been simplified by merging pre-season and in-season item planning into one single process. Once items are planned in pre-season and approved, the planner can leverage the insights the forecast generated in-season for the rest of the season to adjust the plans.

The new Assortment Planning solution powered by AI Foundation allows the retailers to get insights from AI Foundation and make the best Assortment decisions that meet the Organizational goals.

The new Assortment Planning solution is housed on Oracle Retail Analytics and Planning (RAP) providing seamless near real-time integration between various planning modules, AI Foundation, Analytics, Data Visualization, and Merchandising systems. Data visualization also allows the planners to get the best visual context of their data and make the right decisions.

See the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning User Guide for update 22.2.302.0.