4 Other Implementation Considerations
Before you start adding items, stores, warehouses, and suppliers into Merchandising, there are a few things that should be considered. For most Merchandising implementations, it is assumed that data will be converted into the solution using the Merchandising Data Conversion application. But, if using the screens to do any type of data entry, the following should be noted.
Create a Company
Merchandising supports only a single company that is the top of both the merchandise and organizational hierarchies. This company must be inserted directly in the table before any hierarchy data can be added, but subsequent updates can be done using the spreadsheet download/upload process. More details on this can be found in the "Organizational Hierarchy" section in the Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation User Guide.
Financials Pre-Requisites
If you are integrating to a financials system, such as Oracle Cloud Financials, there are certain data elements that are typically managed in the financials solution that must be loaded into Merchandising prior to creating suppliers and locations. These include currency rates, payment and freight terms, sets of books, and org units. Transfer entities, although not managed as part of financials integration, are also included in this section as there are similar setup dependencies. Additionally, other information also needs to be configured to ensure that financial data from the Merchandising stock ledger can be sent to the General Ledger.
The sections below indicate the key areas to be initialized in Merchandising to ensure that data can be set up in Merchandising and that your financial integration will be configured properly. See the RFI Implementation Guide for more details on all these data elements.
Currency Rates
Although the currencies themselves are loaded as part of seed data, exchange rates are not loaded, but at least one rate will be needed for each currency that is relevant for your implementation, including stores, warehouses, partners, and suppliers. It is recommended that you remove any currencies not relevant for your business to avoid importing unnecessary exchange rates. See "Manage Currencies" for more details on manually loading exchange rates.
Generally, an external source provides the exchange rates for both Merchandising and your financials solution. So, as an alternative to loading these manually, you can also initialize these through the financials integration. For Peoplesoft and Oracle Financials, Merchandising has out of the box integration to import currency rates. See the "Initial Loading of Currency Exchange Rates" section in the RFI Implementation Guide for more details.
Payment and Freight Terms
Before creating suppliers and partners, you will need to make sure that you have loaded the applicable payment and freight terms into Merchandising. You will also want to ensure that these are the same payment and freight terms used by your financials application. Similar to currency rates, Merchandising also has integration for payment terms if you are using Peoplesoft as your financials application. However, for other solutions and for freight terms, these are manually managed between the two solutions. See "Manage Freight and Payment Terms" in the Oracle Retail Merchandising Finance User Guide.
Transfer Entities, Sets of Books, and Org Units
Before you start creating locations and suppliers, you'll need to configure your transfer entities, sets of books, and org units in Merchandising. Sets of books and org units are used as part of the financials integration, but they must be manually configured into Merchandising. All implementations require at least one set of books and one org unit be configured into the solution. Transfer entities are required if you've set the Intercompany Transfer Basis to Transfer Entity, but otherwise are optional. If using, these must also be set up prior to creating stores, warehouses, and any external finishers. You will also need to define a relationship between transfer entities, sets of books, and org units as part of this setup. Instructions for managing all these entities are found in the "Manage Financial Administration Data" chapter of the Oracle Retail Merchandising Finance User Guide.
Suppliers
Suppliers are usually initiated in financials and integrated into Merchandising, rather than created within Merchandising manually. If you are using this method to manage your suppliers, then it is recommended this is how suppliers be initialized in Merchandising as well. This is because the financial integration utilizes a cross-reference table for supplier IDs used between solutions. More information on this can be found in the RFI Implementation Guide in the "Supplier Information Integration" section.
General Ledger Configuration
Once locations and hierarchies have been established in Merchandising, you will need to configure how stock ledger data will be mapped to the General Ledger (GL). There are two components of this: GL Setup, which contains key information by set of books used in the GL mapping, and GL Cross References, which are used to map the various stock ledger transactions to GL accounts. The GL Setup also provides for defining clearing accounts for each set of books into which transactions which are missing mappings at the time of month closure can be posted. The details on how to configure these components can be found in the Oracle Retail Merchandising Finance User Guide. Once the cross-references have been established, you can use the validation service that exists as part of the financials integration to validate your configuration, if you are configured to use RFI. For more details on this, see the Requesting Chart of Accounts Combination Validation section in the Oracle Retail Financials Integration Implementation Guide.
If you are not using RFI for financials integration, then financial accounts are validated based on those stored in Merchandising. The GL Chart of Accounts Subscription can be used for importing those details.
Domain Value Maps
If you are using the Oracle Retail Financials Integration (RFI) to integrate with PeopleSoft, Oracle Financials (EBS), or Cloud Financials, there are cross-references that also must be set up as part of the implementation called Domain Value Maps. This is applicable for the following entities: freight and payment terms, org units, sets of books, country codes, currency conversion types, currency codes, language codes, states, and VAT codes. These cross references are generally a one-time setup upon initial conversion, but the following will need to be manually managed between solutions if updates are made post implementation - freight terms, payment terms, and org unit IDs.
For more details on this, see the Oracle Retail Financial Integration for Oracle Retail Merchandise Operations Management and Oracle Financials Implementation Guide section on "Working with Domain Value Maps (DVMs)".
Pricing Pre-Requisites
Merchandising has a dependency on Pricing for managing initial pricing for items. It uses the Pricing zone group/zone definitions and rounding rules to help default a suggested retail price based on the cost for the item. This is applicable whether you're running the full Pricing functionality or running in simplified mode. For details on how to manage these entities, see the Oracle Retail Pricing Foundation Data User Guide.
Price Zone Groups and Zones
Zones are used to group stores and warehousesFoot 1 that are priced similarly together for more effective management of pricing. One or more zone groups can exist to support different pricing approaches, such as by hierarchy, by type of pricing, and so on. Before creating locations, at least one zone group should be created in Pricing. Then, when you create your first location in Merchandising, it will be automatically added to the zone group and will create a zone in the currency of the location that you added. Subsequent locations will use a "like location" to determine whether to add the new location to the existing zone, or if the location is a different currency, create a new zone. After all locations have been initialized in Merchandising, you can add more zones or move locations between zones, as needed.
Rounding Rules
Rounding rules are optional, but if desired these can be created to indicate how to smooth calculated retail prices. For example, if you want all your non-sale prices to have 00 as the decimal. Rounding rules can also be configured to be used for initial pricing by defining it as part of the initial price zone definition.
Initial Price Zone Definitions
In order to establish the zone group that should be used when initializing retail price for an item, a relationship between the department, class, or subclass from Merchandising is made with a zone group in the Initial Price Zone Definition in Pricing. This definition also includes the markup type (cost or retail), a target markup percent, and optionally the rounding rule that should apply. This is then used for all new items created in that hierarchy for establishing the retail price by zone based on the primary supplier's cost. This relationship must be defined before creating items in Merchandising.
Footnote Legend
Footnote 1:There is a system option in Pricing that determines whether or not warehouse prices will be managed in zones. If this is set to No, then warehouses will not be added to zones when created.