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 Merchandising Cloud Services 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 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?
Supplier Default Pay Site	Merchandising, Invoice Matching ,	Small	Enabled	No
“No Change” Promotional Offer	Pricing	Small	Enabled	No
Up Charge Min/Max Calculations	Merchandising	Small	Enabled	No
Order Revision Review Workflow	Merchandising	Small	Disabled	Yes
Business Metric Integration with Retail Home	Merchandising, Retail Home	Small	Disabled	Yes
Data Conversion Enhancements	Merchandising, Pricing	Small	Enabled	No
Retail Data Store (RDS) Availability	New Product	Medium	Disabled	Yes
ReST Enabled Subscription	Merchandising	Small	Enabled	No

Supplier Default Pay Site

The ability to specify a specific, default pay site for a purchasing site is being added in this Cloud Service update. When a default pay site has been specified for a purchasing site, any invoices posted to the financial system for the purchasing site will be posted with the default pay site as the payment site. The default pay site will be an optional field that will be available in the Supplier Maintenance taskflow in Merchandising. If a default pay site is not provided for a purchase site, the existing rules for determining the correct payment site will be used. No action will be required to enable this feature as it will be available by default when this Cloud Service update is applied

“No Change” Promotional Offer

The ability to create a promotional offer with no change to the selling price is being added in this Cloud Service update. This ability will be available for item-level offers with the type of Simple Discount and the template of Get Y for Discount. In this case, when the discount type is Amount Off, the value of 0 will be allowed. Previously the amount off needed to be greater than 0. This ability will be available anywhere a discount can be defined, including the Offer Rewards Screen, Promotion Create REST Service, the Promotion Induction Batch, and the Promotion Induction Spreadsheet Upload. No action is required to enable this feature as it will be available by default when this Cloud Service update is applied.

Up Charge Min/Max Calculations

Within Merchandising, up charges refer to costs or expenses incurred while moving goods between locations and these can be set up as independently defined values or calculated parameters. Based on recent enhancements in a previous Cloud Service update, the system can support up charge calculations of a monetary amount for a given unit of measure, a percentage of the weighted average cost/supplier cost/net cost or a percentage of the sum of other up charges. However, there can be scenarios where the user might want to calculate an up charge as the maximum or the minimum of two or more values, which was not previously feasible. This Cloud Service update will include a set of enhancements that will provide the user with the ability to configure additional ways which can be used to determine the final up charge to be used for a certain computation value base while processing the related transfers or allocations. No action will be required when this service update is applied as this feature is disabled by default. If you choose to use it the existing upcharge definitions should be reviewed for update, or new upcharge definitions added.

Order Revision Review Workflow

This Cloud Service update will include a new Purchase Order (PO) Revision Review workflow report in the Buyer Dashboard. This report will allow the user to review, then approve or reject PO revisions coming from suppliers without having to drill into the detail of each impacted order. The ability to explicitly reject a PO revision is a new feature that is being included in this service update. This new report will support the ability to reject or approve the PO revisions en masse, as required. Order revisions include date changes (not before, not after), and item/location-level unit cost and quantity changes. In addition to this new workflow report, the Buyer Dashboard will be enhanced to include more flexibility in the search criteria. The ability to search by Buyer, Item, Chain, Location (including warehouses), and/or written date is being added.

Steps to Enable

To access the Order Revision Review report, follow the security configuration instructions for this release to add the respective duty to the role that needs the access.

Duties

Duty	Duty Description	Child Duties	Base Role	New/Updated?
RMS_PURCHASE_ORDER_APPROVAL_DUTY	A duty for approving purchase orders, and accepting or rejecting purchase order revisions. This duty is an extension of the Purchase Order Management Duty.			Updated

Privileges

Privilege	Privilege Description	Parent Duty	Change Type
Accept Purchase Order Revisions Priv	A privilege for accepting purchase order revisions. Users with this privilege must also have the Search Purchase Orders Priv, the View Purchase Orders Priv and the Maintain Purchase Orders Priv.	RMS_PURCHASE_ORDER_APPROVAL_DUTY	New
Reject Purchase Order Revisions Priv	A privilege for rejecting purchase order revisions. Users with this privilege must also have the Search Purchase Orders Priv, the View Purchase Orders Priv and the Maintain Purchase Orders Priv.	RMS_PURCHASE_ORDER_APPROVAL_DUTY	New

Business Metric Integration with Retail Home

The Merchandising Cloud Services previously provided a mechanism for calculating some specific business metrics that provide insight into the usage of the Cloud Services. These metrics are calculated by a batch job and stored in a specific business metrics table in the application database. More information about these metrics and the batch job can be found in the Merchandise Foundation Cloud Service Operations Guide Volume 1, with the job title Retail Business Metrics Calculation.

With this Cloud Service update the calculated business metrics will now also be viewable in Retail Home tiles. The tiles will group the business metrics as follows:

Tile 1: Merchandising Metrics

• Tile State 1: Purchase Order Metrics

  • Metric 1: Count of Purchase Order Receipts

  • Metric 2: Count of Purchase Order Lines Received

• Tile State 2: Stock Order Metrics

  • Metric 1: Count of Stock Orders Receipts

  • Metric 2: Count of Stock Order Lines Received

• Tile State 3: Cost Change Metrics

  • Metric 1: Count of Cost Changes

  • Metric 2: Count of Cost Change Details

• Tile State 4: Cost Change Location Details

  • Metric 1: Count of Cost Change Locations

• Tile 2: Sales Audit Metrics

  • Tile State 1: Count of Sales Audit Transaction Line Items

Details for the REST service end points that enable these metrics to be configured and viewed in Retail Home are included in the Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service Operations Guide, Volume 2.

In addition to exposing the calculated metrics in Retail Home, this Cloud Service update will include the ability to manage which metrics are calculated and how they’re calculated by using the spreadsheet download/upload feature in Merchandising. A new template for Retail Business Metrics has been added under the Administration template type.

Steps to Enable

Enabling this feature for use requires that the calculations be enabled using the spreadsheet download/upload function and configuring the tiles and tile states within Retail Home to perform the REST service calls once the metrics are calculated. More information for configuring tiles in Retail Home is available in the Retail Home Administration Guide.

Data Conversion Enhancements

This Cloud Service update will include the addition clearances to the data conversion tool. This new conversion option will follow the same patterns used by the conversion tool, leveraging files (.dat) that are loaded via the on-line conversion screens. This conversion will result in the creation of clearance groups, clearances, timelines for the clearances in future retail, and price history entries.

The data conversion tool has also been updated to enable the future retail seeding process to be run through the on-line conversion screens. Previously it could only be run through a backend script.

Retail Data Store (RDS) Availability

Oracle Retail Data Store enables retailers to unlock the value of their data through a comprehensive set of tools, enabling virtually unlimited extensibility while abstracting those workloads from those of the original Oracle Retail Cloud Services. This toolset allows the retailer to create a wide variety of functionality that they can tailor specifically to their own business processes. Examples include custom web services to expose specific data elements, custom integration (inbound and outbound), reporting and analytics, and custom user interfaces for capturing retailer-specific data.

A separate subscription, different from Merchandising Cloud Services, is required for Oracle Retail Data Store which is composed of two parts:

• Oracle Retail Data Compute Cloud Service – this portion of the subscription covers compute resources available to the Cloud Service and allows a retailer to add compute to their solution as necessary for their extensions.

• Oracle Retail Data Storage Cloud Service – this portion of the subscription covers data storage resources available to the Cloud Service and allows a retailer to add storage to their solution as necessary for their extensions.

Steps to Enable

See the Retail Data Store Implementation Guide for details on how to leverage the Retail Data Store for the Merchandising Cloud Services. The RDS data model for Merchandising can be found in My Oracle Support under Doc ID 2832105.1.

ReST Enabled Subscription APIs

With this update, new synchronous subscription ReST enabled services are introduced in Merchandising. The existing methods of integration, which leverages the Oracle Retail Integration CS (RICS) component (RIB and SOAP) between External systems and RMFCS are planned for deprecation in a future release once the ReST-based alternatives are available for all APIs. Until then, the available interfaces via RICS remain in place to support integrations for backward compatibility with 3rd party solutions.

The below listed services have been introduced in this release:

• Get Pricing Cost

• Update Average Cost

• Update Customer Credit Status

• Get BI Publisher Report URL

• Create Customer Order Item Substitution

• Get Available Inventory for Customer Orderable Items

• Create Inventory Backorder

• Create Differentiator Groups

• Update Differentiator Groups

• Delete Differentiator Groups

• Create Differentiators

• Update Differentiators

• Create Freight Term

• Create Cost Change Effective Immediately