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1 Overview
This document provides an overview of tools and options provided in the Merchandising Cloud Service suite for customizing or configuring the solutions to meet your business. The solutions covered in the scope of this document include:
| Functional Name | Cloud Service |
|---|---|
| Merchandising | Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service - Merchandising module |
| Sales Audit | Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service - Sales Audit module |
| Trade Management | Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service - Trade Management module |
| Pricing | Oracle Retail Pricing Cloud Service (RPCS) |
| Allocation | Oracle Retail Allocation Cloud Service (RACS) |
| Invoice Matching | Oracle Retail Invoice Matching Cloud Service (ReIMCS) |
The Merchandising suite is considered closed source code. This means that the ability to customize or extend the solutions is limited, however the solutions do provide some options. This section will describe how to leverage these capabilities.
Common Use Cases
Some of the most common use cases for customizing or extending the Merchandising solutions are to
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Make additional attributes available in a workflow
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Add custom reports to existing dashboards
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Add a custom dashboard
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Create a bolt-on application to accomplish a certain task
Add Attributes to a Workflow
If you would like visibility to additional attributes to assist your users in decision-making while using the Merchandising solutions, the easiest way to provide this information is to create a small report and display it in the contextual pane of the applicable workflow. This can be used for base attributes, as well as any attributes added using the Custom Flex Attributes functionality or even attribution from an external source. If you want to use base product or flex attributes to display the attributes based on live production data, then you’ll need to use BI Publisher to create the report (see “Using BI Publisher for Custom Reports”). If you want to use external data sources, have more complex calculations that are required for your report, or wish to use a different technology, then any URL-based report can be used. For more on how to configure contextual reports, see the section below titled “Contextual Reports”. Regardless of the technology used, you can follow the Merchandising Style Guide to get a similar look and feel for your report to what is used elsewhere in the applications.
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Add Custom Dashboard Reports
Merchandising solutions provide a number of dashboard reports as part of the base solution. The platform allows you to turn base reports off and on, re-order them on a dashboard, or even have them appear on other dashboards. There are also a number of configuration options for the base dashboard reports. The details on configuring the order or adding and removing base reports is described below in the “Dashboards” section. Also in this section, it describes how to configure a custom report in the base dashboards. Like the contextual reports described above, dashboard reports can be written in BI Publisher against the live production data, or can use any URL-based report built in BI Publisher (see “Using BI Publisher for Custom Reports”) or other technologies that are based on other data sources. Regardless of the technology used, you can follow the Merchandising Style Guide to get a similar look and feel for your report to what is used elsewhere in the applications.
Add a Custom Dashboard
If you have a need to create a new dashboard outside of the base-provided dashboards, this can be created in an external technology and linked into the Reports Menu using the platform configurations. This will make it look to users like the other dashboards. However, it should be noted that when this dashboard is launched, it will result in a new window or tab in the browser being opened.
Create a Bolt-on Application
If your business requires a custom process that cannot be accomplished in the Merchandising screens, you can build a bolt-on application leveraging the Merchandising library of web services and other APIs that allow it to interact with the Merchandising solutions. If you require data that is not available in one of these services or APIs, then because the database and application server cannot be accessed directly, you may also need to use the Retail Data Store (RDS) or the Data Access Schema (DAS) in order to access some of the data.
RDS 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.
Note:
For more information on using the RDS see the Retail Data Store Implementation Guide .
The DAS is a one-way, near real-time replication of data. The target environment would live in an on-premise or PaaS environment, which could also be used to host the custom application.
If you use this as part of your implementation, you can use the data in the read-only replicated data in the target environment to create your own query web services or as the basis for your custom application. The diagram below shows an example of how this might look.
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