Retail Merchandising Cloud Services

Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service allows retailers to manage, control, and perform seamless execution of day-to-day merchandising activities, including purchasing, distribution, order fulfillment, and financial close. Let's look at how sales and returns are easily processed with the retail merchandising cloud.

Let's begin with transaction processing. Our customer, Sarah, goes online to purchase a newly released product. She chooses store pickup as she will be in the area that day. Retailers supporting Buy Online Pickup in Store (BOPIS) have seen tremendous growth in this journey over the last twelve months.

Sarah's transaction is registered in central inventory on the Oracle Retail Merchandising System. Ivan, the store planner, drills into the inventory record and sees that the inventory has been moved from on-hand to customer order reserved, maintaining an accurate central inventory record. At this point all other relevant processes will use this updated, accurate picture of the store's inventory position for this product. For example available to promise for further reservations will use the true on hand of 4 units.

Sarah has paid for the goods online but has not picked them up yet. Sarah's individual sales transaction is correctly captured as a pre-paid liability in Oracle Retail Sales Audit. Sarah is just one of thousands of individual transactions being automatically and correctly processed.

The store associate, May, is alerted of the reservation in Oracle Retail Store Inventory Operations Cloud Service and instructed to pick the goods for Sarah. May uses her handheld device to perform the customer pick and puts away the goods for collection. She collects important information leveraging custom flex attributes and chooses the pickup location to streamline the in-store pickup.

After May confirms the pick, the system automatically notifies Sarah that she can now come in and pickup her purchase. Sarah receives a SMS notification (her preferred method on her customer record) that her order is ready for collection. She heads to the store to pick up her purchase.

Sarah arrives at the store and shows the SMS notification to collect her goods. The collection process is simple since she has already paid. May records collection is complete on her handheld device and thanks Sarah for her purchase. May can also choose to further engage Sarah at this point.

Now that Sarah has picked up her goods the liability can be reversed, and the transaction can move to 'complete' status in Sales Audit. This maintains financial accuracy by recording when the transaction took place and when the initial liability became recognized revenue.

"We've just looked at a single BOPIS transaction for our customer, Sarah. Note that all sales and returns will be automatically processed correctly to ensure the same level of financial and inventory accuracy. The Merchandising Cloud Service supports many sales & return transactions, enabling correct processing of various consumer journeys."

All raw transactions are audited in Oracle Retail Sales Audit using automated rules to check for errors and inconsistencies. Valid transactions flow straight through the process and are released to update relevant downstream processes and services. Flagged transactions will be alerted to sales auditors to be reviewed and corrected before being released.

Jen, the sales auditor, reviews the detail of the invalid transactions and corrects them in Sales Audit. Jen is given all available transaction details as well as contextual BI. The error code directs Jen to the likely cause of the issue. Full access to the entire transaction is important for context as is the historic view of similar issues – the auditor, for example, may have a case where this is deliberate shrinkage vs an honest mistake or data error.

Jen can also work systematically through noted exceptions, reviewing the detail of the invalid transactions and correcting them. This is a transaction record selected from an exception list. Jen is given all available transaction details as well as contextual BI. The error code will direct them to the likely cause of the issue. Jen can then determine how to resolve it or if further research is required.

At this point in the cycle, all transactions involving inventory, whether a sale, a return, an adjustment or Store to Store Transfer will update the central inventory view in Oracle Retail Merchandising System. Accurate, perpetual inventory is always maintained as the assortment is engaged with by customers. This will inform accurate stock valuation.

To recap, transactions from all channels flow through an auditing and transaction processing capability to ensure their validity and correctly categorize them by type. Clean, valid sales and returns transactions will then flow through to update, at minimum, the stock ledger, inventory management, order management, financial ledgers, and analytics and BI.