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
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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
New Purchase Order Review Task Flow
The Purchase Order Review Task Flow provides an efficient new way for orders from multiple sources (replenishment, manual orders, external, and so on) to be reviewed and approved. For replenishment orders, the workflow shows all errors generated by the replenishment batch in the contextual Replenishment Approval Errors report. The workflow provides advanced filtering capability including the ability to configure the grouping of orders by error type or error category. The order data can be reviewed in aggregate by department, class, subclass, or location. In addition, it can be reviewed in detail at the item/location level. The Order Detail screen includes the ability to modify quantities, re-scale the order, and try different quantities with the option to roll back the original order quantity if the changes don’t give the desired result. The task flow supports an option to use a REST service to call Retail Inventory Optimization Cloud Service (RIOCS) to perform order scaling. Also included in the task flow is a Projected Order Quantity Timeline contextual report showing expected inventory levels for an item/location combination over a given time period. This contextual report leverages the expected inventory levels calculated in the Inventory Optimization Cloud Service.
Replenishment Additional Demand
The replenishment additional demand functionality provides flexibility to supplement forecasted demand for an item/location with additional demand from external systems before the replenishment module calculates the recommended order quantity (ROQ). This cloud service update will allow store/warehouse locations on the Time Supply and Dynamic replenishment methods to check if the item/Location has additional demand enabled and if additional demand exists. The forecasted sales/issues would be augmented based on the additional demand at location and the ROQ generated based on the overall demand.
File ID in Order Integrations
To support supplier pooling within Merchandising, the recommended order quantities (ROQ) for individual suppliers are linked using a “File ID” while generating orders from the Buyer Worksheet. This field is now available as part of the Purchase Order XAPI, Purchase Order Induction and the two related ReST services. This identifier provides visibility to the pooled constraints in the Buyer Worksheet based on which necessary adjustments can be made to the pooled orders.
Franchise Orders with Zero Stock-on-Hand
A new system option ‘Validate Availability for External Franchise Orders’ has been introduced that controls whether or not External Franchise Orders (namely those created via the Franchise Order Upload batch or the Create Franchise Order webservice) are subject to inventory availability considerations when the order is sourced from a company store or warehouse. This new option is defaulted to ‘Yes’ ensuring that the existing behavior of validating for inventory availability persists. If it is intended that External Franchise Orders be created without validating for inventory availability at the source location, then this option can be set to ‘No’.
Upcharge Detail REST Service
This provides an option to retrieve the details of all the upcharges that are associated with an item/location combination within Merchandising which are likely to impact its pricing cost on a future date. As an input, the item or list of items, location and a future date need to be specified for which the web service will return the calculated values of all the up charges that are linked with the future cost applicable for the item/location combinations on the provided date.
Billback Deals at Gross Purchases
This cloud service update provides flexibility to invoice purchase-based Bill Back deals, that are applied at the time of receiving, at gross value without adjusting for RTVs and Receiver Unit and Cost Adjustments. This option can be specified for a deal by selecting ‘Gross Receipt’ under the attribute ‘Deal Invoicing Basis’ during deal creation. The current options for purchase-based deals that allow invoicing at the time of PO approval or net receipts remains unchanged and can be specified under the same attribute by selecting ‘Approved POs’ and ‘Net Receipts’ respectively. This new option is available both on the screen as well as deal upload.
Slow Item Create REST Services
This service supports subscribing to new placeholder items (Style/Color or Styles) created in Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Cloud Service (AP) as part of the slow item creation workflow. Using this service, AP can create items in the Item induction staging area within Merchandising with partial information of the item that can be enriched at a later point using the item induction process. The item number fetched using the Reserve item number service for the placeholder item number is used by AP.
The following item attributes are defaulted in this service -
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The transaction level of the item will be 2.
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The item will be a regular (non-pack, non-catchweight), sellable, orderable, inventoried, merchandise one.
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The item will be created in the Worksheet status.
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The standard UOM will be set to Each (EA).
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The Store order multiple will be set to 'E' (Eaches).
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The item number type will be Manual.
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The aggregate indictors for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th differentiators will be set to 'N'.
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The pallet/case/inner name will be set to PAL/CS/INR respectively.
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The only UDA supported is LV (List of Values).
Systematic Setting of Item Base Expense and Enhanced Expense Defaulting to Purchase Orders
The system has been enhanced to allow the capture of primary port pairing definitions via spreadsheet upload. Primary ports are pairings which are most commonly used when sourcing merchandise for a particular country of sourcing/import country combination. If primary ports are defined, the system utilizes these ports when defaulting item expenses to purchase orders.
Prior to this enhancement, the system would default item expenses by first looking for an exact match based on the purchase order’s definition, and if not found the system would default the set of expenses marked as base. With this enhancement, the system looks for an exact match, if not found, the system then looks for a match utilizing primary ports. If no match is found for the primary ports, depending on the value of a new system option, the system may default the set of item expenses marked as base.
The system was also enhanced to support the systematic marking of an item expense shipping route as the ‘Base Expense’ when expense profiles default to items. If only one item expense shipping route defaults for a given item/supplier site or item/supplier site/country of sourcing combination, the system will mark that as the base expense. If more than one shipping route defaults, the system will utilize the primary ports for marking country level item expenses and primary discharge ports defined for the cost zone group for marking zone level item expenses.
To support this new functionality, two new system options (Default Base Expenses when no Match Found, First Port Used for Base Zone Expense) have been added, and a Discharge Port for Base Expense field, was added to the cost zone group definition.
Addition of Item Season Information to Item Publish ReST API
In this version of Merchandising, Item Publish ReST API is enhanced to include Item Season details such as Season ID, Phase ID, Sequence Number, Diff ID, Create Datetime, and Update Datetime.
Steps to Enable
Execute MERCHAPI_DATA_REBUILD_ADHOC_JOB with parameters as API Name – ‘foundation/item’, Refresh Type – REBUILD and Update Timestamp – Y.
Execute MERCHAPI_REFRESH_ADHOC_JOB which takes the above request and repairs data in merchapi_ext_item table.
Additional Fields in Item Location Omnichannel ReST Service
The following attributes have been added to the response payload of Omni Item Location ReST Service
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Local Short Description
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Source Method
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Source Warehouse
Steps to Enable
Execute MERCHAPI_DATA_REBUILD_ADHOC_JOB with parameters as API Name – 'foundation/omnichannel/item/itemlocation', Refresh Type – REBUILD and Update Timestamp – Y.
Execute MERCHAPI_REFRESH_ADHOC_JOB which takes this request and repairs data in the cache (merchapi_item_loc) table.
Data Conversion – Templates Modified to Include New Fields
The following templates in the Data Conversion tool have been modified to include new fields in Merchandising:
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MASTER_REPL_ATTR
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INCLUDE_ADDITIONAL_DEMAND: Indicates whether the additional demand is enabled for an Item/Location or not.
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COST_ZONE_GROUP
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DISCHARGE_PORT_BASE_EXP: Contains the discharge port which is the primary port used for the base cost zone within that cost zone group, this discharge port will be used to determine how to systematically mark a set of zone level item expenses as the Base Expense
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COST_ZONE_GROUP_LOC
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PRIMARY_DISCHARGE_PORT: Contains the identification of the primary discharge port where items are entering the country for the location. It is used to assess estimated landing cost for the purposes of future cost calculations
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Steps to Enable
Download the latest templates for these entities and modify data files to include the new fields
Enhanced the Financial Treatment of Intra-company and Inter-company Transfers
An enhancement was made in this update to support treating intra-company and inter-company transfers the same when calculating the half-to-date goods available for sale retail and cost values, by including the intercompany-in and intercompany-out values in the calculations.
Enhancement to Publish Promo Offers Immediately Upon Approval
Prior to this change, promo offers will be published to downstream systems only if their state is within price_event_processing_days from current vdate. As part of this enhancement, a new system option “Publish Promo Upon Approval” was introduced. If this is set (checked), then promo offers will be communicated to downstream system immediately upon approval.
Steps to Enable
Update the system option “Publish Promo Upon Approval” to checked to enable this feature.
Enhancement to Support the Purging of Batch Process Execution Records
A new feature has been added to allow the systematic purging of batch process execution records and associated task details after a configurable retention period has been reached.
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A new Batch Process History Days (batch_process_hist_days) system option has been added. The default value of this option is 30 days, but this can be adjusted as desired.
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When the new purge job is executed, it deletes all the records from the Batch Process (rpm_batch_process) table where the records have a status of 'ENDED' and the End Timestamp is older than the Batch Process History Days system option.
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The corresponding child records from Batch Process Tasks (rpm_batch_process_tasks) table are also deleted.
Include Context Related Fields in XAlloc API and Allocation ReST Services
While creating an allocation, the user can associate the actual reason behind this creation and the overall requirement of this allocation in the business setup of the retailer. This is done by associating certain ‘Context’ values during the creation process via the Allocation CS UI.
With this enhancement, the XAlloc API and the Create Allocations and Update Allocations ReST services payload now include the ‘Context Type’ and ‘Context Value’ fields and the values that are provided by the user via the API for these two fields will be saved in the ALLOC_HEADER table against that specific allocation.
ReST Based Subscription APIs – New Services
This update of Merchandising introduces following ReST based alternatives for the corresponding subscription APIs. The available interfaces via RICS remain in place.
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Create Item Expenses Service
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Create Item HTS Assessments Service
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Create Item HTS Service
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Create Item Images Service
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Create Item Locations Service
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Create Item Seasons Service
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Create Item Supplier Countries of Manufacture Service
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Create Item Supplier Country Dimensions Service
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Create Item Suppliers Service
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Create Item Taxes Service
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Create Item Tickets Service
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Create Item UDAs Service
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Create Location Trait Service
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Create Purchase Order Letters of Credit Service
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Create Stock Count Schedules Service
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Create Store Service
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Create Walk-Through Store Service
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Delete Inbound ASNs Service
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Delete Item Expenses Service
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Delete Item HTS Assessments Service
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Delete Item HTS Service
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Delete Item Images Service
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Delete Item Seasons Service
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Delete Item Supplier Countries of Manufacture Service
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Delete Item Supplier Country Dimensions Service
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Delete Item Suppliers Service
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Delete Item Taxes Service
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Delete Item Tickets Service
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Delete Item UDAs Service
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Delete Location Trait Service
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Delete Purchase Order HTS Assessments Service
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Delete Purchase Order Letters of Credit Service
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Delete Stock Count Schedule Locations Service
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Delete Stock Count Schedules Service
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Delete Store Service
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Delete Transfer Details Service
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Delete Transfers Service
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Delete Walk-Through Store Service
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Get Item Location Deals Service
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Manage Inbound ASN Service
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Manage Purchase Order Receipts Service
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Manage Stock Order Status Service
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Update Item Expenses Service
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Update Item HTS Assessments Service
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Update Item HTS Service
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Update Item Images Service
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Update Item Locations Service
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Update Item Supplier Countries of Manufacture Service
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Update Item Supplier Country Dimensions Service
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Update Item Suppliers Service
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Update Item UDAs Service
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Update Location Trait Service
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Update Purchase Order HTS Assessments Service
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Update Purchase Order Letters of Credit Service
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Update Stock Count Schedules Service
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Update Store Service
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Update Suppliers Service
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Update Transfer Details Service
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Update Transfers Service