Merchandise Financial Planning 19.x and 23.x

Dashboards and Tiles

The Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) solution provides support for Retail Home tile content. Tiles can display information to provide a picture of the performance of a user’s plans and metrics about the overall health of the business as a whole. Merchandise Financial Planning 23.x also supports the use of Retail Home’s resource bundle customization (RBC) to allow customization of many of the labels displayed within the AP application. Additionally, the MFP solution supports attaching Data Visualizer (DV) reports to tiles to allow users to launch into reports relevant to the metrics displayed. Users may also display Assortment Planning data that is integrated into DV via custom BI template reports as detailed in the Retail Home Templates from RI section above.

The content of the tiles displayed in Retail Home for the Merchandise Financial Planning application are determined by a set of configuration resources. These resources are created as a part of the configuration of the application and allow for the same level of flexibility and configurability as the overall application.

The data values displayed within the Merchandise Financial Planning tiles in Retail Home are not pulled in real time from the live data stored within the Planning Data Store. The data is instead drawn from the same source as the data displayed in the in-app dashboard for the solution. This means that the values displayed in Retail Home will be synchronized with the values within the MFP dashboard; allowing users to launch into the solution and gain more insight into the displayed metrics. It also means that the values displayed within Retail Home will not update automatically; they will only update when the in-app MFP dashboard is refreshed.

Customers using the MFP Template application will find a set of pre-configured tiles available for their use. These tiles states associated with a tile correspond to pre-defined business roles within the MFP Template application and provide a set of metrics appropriate for that business role. The MFP template application has also been pre-configured with the measures and rules necessary to provide the information used by the template tile states to Retail Home. Information on these pre-configured tiles and their contents can be found in the Retail Home section of chapter 1 MFP Batch Task Administration of the Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service Administration Guide.

Customers using a customized version of Merchandise Financial Planning will need to provide a custom configuration for Retail Home tiles, as detailed within the Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition chapter of this guide.

Seeding Retail Home Data

The MFP solution does not make use of the Refresh Seed data task in Application Navigator. Instead, an Administration task must be run within the application by a user with Merchandise Financial Planning application administrator privileges. The Retail Home Seeding task provides Retail Home with information about the tiles for the MFP solution as well as configuring metadata within the application to allow the solution to provide the correct application data to Retail Home.

For information about the Retail Home Seeding task, please consult the Batch Administration chapter of the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Service Administration Guide.

Additionally, it is required for a user to have a built an-application Dashboard workspace within the Merchandise Financial Planning application for that user to see information within the MFP tile of Retail Home. MFP uses the information within the Dashboard workbook to calculate and return the values requested by Retail Home. Therefore, when the MFP solution is first built, the Schedule Dashboard Build task must run the application for all users. The Schedule Dashboard Build task must also be run for new users when those users are registered in the application so they will have Retail Home tile data available. For information on the Schedule Dashboard Build task, please consult the System Administration chapter of the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition Administration Guide.

Retail Home Content for Customized Applications

Customers using the template solution can customize the content displayed in Retail Home. Customers using a customized solution (one created either partially or fully through custom application configuration) must provide a custom Retail Home configuration to match the custom content of the application.

In either case, the process for providing custom Retail Home content is the same. This information can be found in the Retail Predictive Application Server Cloud Edition chapter of this guide.

Administration Tools

Resource Bundle Customization

In versions 23.x and above, the MFP solution supports the use of the Retail Home Resource Bundle Customization framework for customization and translation of some but not all labels and messages seen within the solution. For these strings, an administrative task is available in Retail Home to allow searching for and viewing supported strings, customizing strings, and restoring customizations to default values.

Other labels and messages seen within the product such as those based upon metadata of the application, or error messages reporting a problem performing an activity on the server such as a custom action, are managed through the in-application Translation Administration administrative task or batch uploads of translated content.

Strings supporting Resource Bundle Customization include:

Labels for controls such as menus, buttons (but not custom actions), etc.
Messages displayed in toast and snackbar notifications in response to user actions
Validation messages provided within the UI

For these strings, customization of individual strings and for large numbers of strings can be achieved using the Resource Text Strings and Import Management tasks in Retail Home.

The strings used by the MFP solution are contained within the MFP Cloud Service, the RpasBundle, and the RpasMessages bundles.

Information on using the Resource Text Strings and Import Management tasks can be found in the Resource Bundles chapter of the Oracle Retail Home Administration Guide.

Strings not managed through the RBC framework include:

Labels of dimension, measures, and positions
View and Dimension labels
Custom action button labels
Messages received from the server detailing failures in submitted actions

These strings are managed internally by the app, as detailed in the Internationalization chapter of the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Cloud Service Administration Guide.

Email Notifications for Batch Tasks

Retail Home supports the configuration of email notifications in response to activities like the success and failure of Online Administration Tools tasks. Information on the process of setting up such notifications can be found in the Online Administration Tools chapter of the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Cloud Service Administration Guide.

Subscription Metric Report

In version 23.x, the Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service provides reporting on subscription usage metrics through Retail Home. For Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service, the Subscription Metric report provides information on annual sales under management of the system, which is the metric used for all Oracle Retail Planning Cloud Services.

This report is visible by navigating to Settings -> Application Administration -> Application Dashboard. Additional details for using the subscription metrics report, such as inputting or editing the subscription start/end dates and the subscription quantity, can be found in the Retail Home Administration Guide.

Note:

Statistics for the report are gathered through an automated job that is set up automatically when the system is created.