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 Insights Cloud Service 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
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Feature: Provides a description of the feature being delivered.
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Module Impacted: Identifies the module associated with the feature, if any.
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Scale: Identifies the size of the feature. Options are:
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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.
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Large: These UI or process-based features have more complex designs. Therefore, the potential impact to users is higher.
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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 | Scale | Delivered | Customer Action Required? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle Analytics Server 6.4 Upgrade |
Large |
Enabled |
No |
| Dimension Support for Reloads |
Small |
Disabled |
Yes |
| Product Incremental Loads |
Small |
Disabled |
Yes |
| Attributes from Multiple Sources |
Small |
Disabled |
Yes |
| Transaction Count Enhancements |
Small |
Disabled |
Yes |
| Plan Interface Support for Alternate Hierarchy Levels |
Small |
Enabled |
No |
| Aggregate Utility Updates |
Small |
Enabled |
No |
| Implementation Self-Service Updates |
Small |
Enabled |
No |
Oracle Analytics Server 6.4 Upgrade
Retail Insights version 23 includes an automatic upgrade to OAS version 6.4, which is the latest available release of Oracle Analytics Server. This is a major release of OAS that includes many new features and functionality as well as a reformatted user interface to align with Oracle Redwood styling.
Review the feature summary for OAS 6.4 here:
Customer Action
While OAS versions should be fully backwards compatible, it is still recommended to perform testing of critical reports, agents, and other business objects when taking any new OAS version. Verify critical business processes in your non-production environment before taking the upgrade to production.Dimension Support for Reloads
The ad hoc loads for product and organization dimensions and hierarchy data have been replaced with new programs that support reloading the data multiple times in the same business date and with reclasses or other major changes. This effectively maintains the product hierarchy as a Type 1 SCD dimension during the history load phase of a project, where reclasses are not applied to fact tables and will simply overwrite your dimensions. The normal Type 2 SCD jobs are still used by the nightly batches and are unchanged by this update. Because the product data is loaded using type 1 behavior, it has the side effect that hierarchy levels introduced by one data load, but no longer used in later files, are still considered active in W_PROD_CAT_DH and other tables. This can result in orphaned hierarchy nodes with no active items assigned to them. A separate job in the process flows in POM will close orphaned hierarchy nodes, if enabled.
Customer Action
New POM jobs are disabled by default and must be enabled by the implementer from Batch Administration screen before using them. You must enable these new jobs before attempting any new adhoc product or organization loads. The new jobs contain TYPE1 in the name to easily identify them. If you have an in-progress implementation and need to reload product or organization data, make sure you understand the differences in load behavior described above before sending new files in.
Product Incremental Loads
The PRODUCT.csv interface behavior for incremental data loads has changed in this release. The data model requires full snapshots of active hierarchies, but the CSV interface does not provide this like the RMFCS integration would. For this reason, RI will automatically assume all existing hierarchies should be kept active/current when an incremental PRODUCT.csv file is sent and the system is configured for incremental loading. This may result in orphaned hierarchies where they are no longer being used in the source system, but RI continues to keep them active. A new batch job has been added in the nightly and adhoc flows to automatically close hierarchy levels which have no children after a dimension load is complete. You may disable this job if you wish all hierarchies (past and present) to remain active indefinitely, even if they do not have any valid items assigned to them currently.
Customer Action
The W_PROD_CAT_DH_CLOSE_JOB should be enabled in your nightly and standalone POM schedules for RI, unless you do not want this behavior and you instead wish to allow all hierarchy levels to remain active indefinitely even when they are not being used by any items. This does not apply if you are using RMFCS integrations, you can leave it disabled in that case.
Attributes from Multiple Sources
The ATTR.csv and PROD_ATTR.csv files can now be used to load non-Oracle attributes even when RMFCS integration is turned on for this data. New POM jobs have been added to the RI schedule which use MERGE behavior instead of INSERT behavior when loading from these tables. If you are using RMFCS integration for product attributes, you will have to enable these additional jobs in order to also use the ATTR.csv/PROD_ATTR.csv interface files. This new integration path also only supports the specific attribute types of ITEMUDA and ITEMLIST. Other types such as item differentiators cannot come from two sources, because they are a core component of the item definitions in RMFCS and must not be updated by non-Oracle inputs.
Customer Action
The new POM jobs are disabled by default and should be enabled in the nightly RI schedule before they can be used to combine CSV data with RMFCS data. Refer to the RAP Implementation Guide chapter on Extensibility for details on this feature.
Transaction Count Enhancements
The Sales Trx Count metrics have had their logic altered to handle cases where a sales transaction comes to RI with zero values on a transaction line. Previously these rows were included in the transaction counts despite not contributing to overall sales values. In this release, all such rows are excluded from the counts. This does not apply to Return Trx Count (which was already using logic that excluded zero rows). It also does not apply to the more generic Trx Count metrics, as those perform a “count(distinct SLS_TRX_ID)” formula with no other logic to limit the count.
Also added in this release are two new aggregate tables for pre-calculating the Sales and Return Trx Count metrics at the levels of Group and Division (previously the metrics were only pre-calculated for Dept/Class/Subclass levels of the merchandise hierarchy). With this addition, the Sales Trx Count and Return Trx Count metrics should return values at any level of the merchandise hierarchy at Subclass or above when used.
Customer Action
New POM jobs are disabled by default and should be enabled in the nightly RI schedule before they can be used. Make sure to enable the following jobs if the new tables are required to be loaded in your nightly RI batch:
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W_RTL_SLS_CNT_DV_LC_DY_A_JOB
-
W_RTL_SLS_CNT_DV_LC_DY_CUR_A_JOB
-
W_RTL_SLS_CNT_GP_LC_DY_A_JOB
-
W_RTL_SLS_CNT_GP_LC_DY_CUR_A_JOB
A historical data correction also needs to be applied to re-calculate all count facts after upgrade. If the sales count tables are not showing corrected data then the historical correction scripts may not have been applied. Raise a Service Request to ask for the data corrections on the sales transaction count tables.
Plan Interface Support for Alternate Hierarchy Levels
All PLAN interfaces (PLAN1 through PLAN5) into Retail Insights will have support for alternate hierarchy levels specified using the PRODUCT_ALT.csv and ORGANIZATION_ALT.csv foundation files. You should use these new configurations specifically when customizing MFP or AP to plan at an alternate hierarchy level and you need to send the plans back to AI Foundation for in-season forecasting or reporting. The configurations are set in C_ODI_PARAM_VW using parameter values of FLEX1 through FLEX30, which denotes the column in the hierarchy file that contains the unique identifiers of the planning level. The hierarchy IDs used for this purpose must be numerical, they cannot contain any letters or special characters.
Customer Action
No action required. New configurations are not used by default. Update the parameters in the Control & Tactical Center in AIF to take advantage of the new options.
Aggregate Utility Updates
The RI aggregation utility has had several updates in this release. A new parameter has been added to C_ODI_PARAM to control the starting and ending dates that the utility uses for aggregation. Depending on the setting, the start/end dates provided by the user can be extended to the beginning of the week or month automatically to fill each partition on the target aggregate tables. This guarantees that each aggregation fully populates partitions with data instead of loading only partial periods due to mismatched dates from the user. Additionally, several mappings that previously used a MIN function have been changed to a SUM to ensure the proper aggregation totals are calculated. Details on the aggregation utility usage can be found in the AI Foundation Cloud Services Operations Guide.
Customer Action
No action required. If you are currently using the aggregation utility, be aware of the new behavior regarding start/end dates as it may result in more aggregated data for a given week/month than previously expected, if the dates used are mid-week.
Implementation Self-Service Updates
he following changes are being made to support new and ongoing implementations of RI or any other Retail Analytics & Planning (RAP) application. These changes are only available in next-generation environments, they will not be released in current-gen architecture.
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RDX data exchange tables will be made visible to APEX
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POM logs will suppress benign “TypeError” messages that do not indicate the real cause of failure
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Staging tables in certain schemas (RADM01 and RASE01) can be directly updated from APEX so you can fix data issues and reload without uploading a new file
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You can now perform custom DB statistics collection on the RI database using the COLLECT_STATS_JOB job and the newly exposed C_MODULE_DBSTATS table in the Control Center
Customer Action
No action required. If you are currently implementing any RAP application, you may begin using the new self-service features after upgrade.