1. Service Administrator Action List
  2. Pre-Provisioning
  3. Prepare Project Team

Prepare Project Team

During this time, you will also be putting together your project plan for the deployment and go-live phases of your implementation. It is important to consider the following during this planning phase to prepare your project team for the Merchandising implementation:

  • OCI Identity and Access Management - As noted above, you will be using the OCI IAM UI for user management for your Merchandising cloud services. During the pre-provisioning timeframe, familiarize yourself with this solution and its features.

  • Golden Gate Configuration - If you will be replicating data to an on premise or PaaS database using Golden Gate to support reporting, custom integration, or extensions, then it is highly recommended that you ensure your team has skills in configuring the receiver components of this technology.

    • See My Oracle Support Doc ID 2283998.1 for details on installing and configuring your target environment

    Additionally, you should begin to work through your plan for how to use the replicated data because those use cases will determine your target architecture and sizing. For example, should the target database be RAC, do you want to use full Golden Gate or the marketplace VM, and so on. Some of these architecture decisions will drive licensing decisions for Golden Gate and those need to be in place before your target can be set up and configured.

  • Project Team Training - Consider the training that the members of your team will need in order to make your implementation successful. This includes both your employees, as well as your systems integration partner. Suggested training topics to consider include:

  • Security Configurations - During this phase, you should designate a portion of your team to becoming familiar with OCI IAM and the enterprise roles, duties, and privileges that will be part of the Merchandising cloud services you are implementing. You can also start designing the roles that you will need for your users, and what duties will be assigned to your custom roles. For more details, please refer to Merchandising Cloud Services Security Guide Volume 2. There is a similar guide for each Merchandising cloud service. For more information on OCI IAM, see Managing Users.

  • Data Conversion Preparations - During this period you can start planning for the eventual data conversion by cleaning up your legacy data - purging outdated items or transactions, ensuring standardization of data, and so on. You can also download the Oracle Retail Merchandising Data Conversion Offline Validator tool from My Oracle Support (Doc ID 2538102.1). This tool can be deployed in your legacy environment to help you start to validate data that will be eventually loaded into to Merchandising environments. This will help you to get a jumpstart on building the transformation logic that will be required.

    For details on using this tool, see the Merchandising Data Conversion Guide.

  • System Options Configuration - Start reviewing the system options available in all the Merchandising solutions to determine how these should be configured. Work with your systems integrator to identify those you are unsure about or need to be considered in the program planning. For details on the system options for each of the cloud services, see the implementation guide for each cloud service.

  • Integration Planning - Start reviewing the available existing integrations available as part of the Merchandising cloud services to support internal Oracle integrations, as well as any integrations you may need to external solutions. This will also help you identify whether you require any custom integrations that may require use of the replicated DAS information, or other components to achieve. Key documents to review include:

    • Operations Guides - Each of the Merchandising cloud services has an operations guide which outlines batches and integrations. For the Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service, there are two volumes. The first is mainly batch processes, but also contains some integrations that are batch and/or flat file based. The second volume is where RIB, ReST and SOAP services, and BDI integration details are held.

    • Oracle Retail Xstore Suite/Merchandising Implementation Guide - This will be an important document to review if you are implementing Xstore with Merchandising. This document is located with the Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service documentation.

    • Retail and WMS Cloud Implementation Guide - This will be an important document to review if you are implementing Merchandising with WMS Cloud (formerly Logfire WMS). This document is located with the Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service documentation.

    • Oracle Retail Merchandising and SIM Integration with OROMS and OROB - This white paper will be an important reference for which integrations are used when integrating with the Oracle Retail Order Management and Oracle Retail Order Broker solutions for customer orders. It can be found on My Oracle Support under Doc ID 2088235.1.

    • Customer Order Journeys - If you are integrating with a third-party OMS for customer ordering, you can reference this white paper found in the Merchandising Functional Library on MOS under Doc ID 1585843.1.

    • Retail Reference Library - This tool is free to all Oracle Retail customers and can be downloaded from My Oracle Support under Doc ID 2058843.2. This tool is composed of multiple parts, but the most critical to become familiar with are the Retail Reference Models (business process flows) and the Retail Reference Architecture (integration diagrams, payloads, and so on).