Pre-Provisioning

Activate Your Service into a Cloud Account

You will receive an activation e-mail from Oracle in the initial stages of provisioning - often immediately after your subscription order is booked. You will need to activate your cloud service into a cloud account to begin the provisioning activities for your Oracle Retail service(s). Promptly complete the activations steps to better enable on-time environment delivery.

On activation of your cloud account you have access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console and the Identity and Access Management (OCI IAM), and your default Identity Domain will be created. An identity domain is a container for managing users and roles, federating and provisioning of users, securing application integration through Oracle Single Sign-On (SSO) configuration, and OAuth administration. It represents a user population in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and its associated configurations and security settings (such as MFA).

Your default identity domain with be of the Oracle Apps type. Each identity domain type is associated with a different set of features and object limits.

Oracle Retail Best Practice for Tenancy, Applications, and Identity Domains

Oracle Retail recommends that all retail applications use the same OCI IAM Domain. All retail application environments must reside within the same OCI IAM domain for Single Sign-On (SSO) to function across production and non-production environments.

If the customer requires separating the identity management for production and non-production environments, the tenancies, domains, and application environments must be organized such that all production (prod) applications are in the same identity domain and all non-production (stage, dev, and so on) applications are in the same identity domain.

For Oracle Retail enterprise integration, the server-to-server security credentials required to flow among the Oracle Retail Applications (for example, Merchandise Foundation Cloud Service to Planning), the applications must reside in the same tenancy.

Note:

Activation of your cloud service into a cloud account does NOT impact billing or the subscription service period - those details are connected to the subsequent environment delivery of the Merchandising cloud services.

Activating into a New Oracle Cloud Account

To start the setup, you'll click the Activate link provided in the e-mail received^Foot 1. Then the following steps are required:

Provide the desired name for the Oracle Cloud Account

A best practice is to use a name which will encompass the scope of services to be managed in the account, such as a combination of your company name and "retail". For example, mystoresretail. After activation, you can adjust the displayed name for the cloud account.
Provide your e-mail address as the customer administrator who receives the activation e-mail.

The e-mail address must match the initial e-mail. If you would like a different contact to be used as the administrator, this can be managed after activation in coordination with your CSM.
The activation success message will display, and you will receive a new welcome e-mail with access credentials.

Activating into an Existing Oracle Cloud Account

Activate your Retail cloud service within the Account Management section of your existing Oracle Cloud Account.

Log in to your existing Oracle Cloud Account.

Clicking the Activate link brings you to the login page.
Within the Dashboard, click on the Account Management menu and then select the Activate tab.

Available services to activate will be listed; you may need to select Show: Pending Activations.
Click the Cloud Service Account Setup button to complete setup.

If you have any issues with the above, see the Frequently Asked Questions chapter.

On-Boarding Questionnaire

This document will be used when building out your Merchandising environments and the answers to the questions are key for the configuration. There are two components to the questionnaire: required questions and optional questions.

The required questions will determine how Merchandising and Pricing will be configured initially. For example, it will specify your primary currency, language, and calendar configuration. The information in this tab is mandatory and is very difficult to change after initial provisioning, so you should carefully review and complete this section. The questionnaire has guidance for helping to answer all questions, but where assistance is required, your CSM representative can assist.

The optional questions are a number of system options which, while they can be changed within certain parameters after provisioning and prior to going live in production, there are some limitations in doing so. So, if you know the answers, it is recommended you provide this information initially. As with the required questions, guidance is provided to help in answering these questions. The default values in the questionnaire are set to the most common implementation configurations and will be used if no other information is provided. Post provisioning, you can find more information on these attributes in the Merchandising Implementation Guide.

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.
- https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Identity/home.htm
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, User Accounts, and Roles.
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. The Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service has two volumes. The first, the Batch Operations Guide, contains details about data processing via batch programs. The second, Inbound and Outbound Integration Guide is where RIB, ReST and SOAP services, and file-based integration details are held.
- Merchandising Cloud Services/Xstore Suite 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 Foundation and Store Inventory Operations Implementation Guide - This document provides an overview of the integration between the Merchandising Foundation and Store Inventory Operations cloud services, which get installed on separate schema on the same database and have direct database integration. This direct method does not require integration middleware and covers most of the integration points between Merchandising and Store Inventory Operations.
- 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).