Oracle Retail released their newest patch, Oracle Retail v19.0, in January 2020, marking the first major update to the Retail Merchandising System since v16.0, a touch over 3 years prior. The extensive update begs the question, should a retail organisation migrate to v19?
The answer will differ heavily based on your use of the prior Oracle Retail system. One needs to consider the notable additions and changes prior to making a decision. We’ve gone through and summarized a few of the more significant ones.
Functional Enhancements
- Oracle listed significant enhancements to Consignment and Concession, including consignment or concession designation and cost management at an item / supplier / country level, and the ability to manage inventory for consignment items.
- 4-6-4 Calendar Support allowing retailers to address the additional week added to the calendar every 7 years.
- Configurable exchange rate dates based on the currency exchange rate in effect on the PO receipt date instead of the rate on the PO itself.
- Multiple enhancements to General Ledger posting and mapping – see documentation in the link at the end of the article for more details.
- Retail for items will always be VAT inclusive when displayed in Merchandising screens going forward, if applicable.
- Support added for the mass reconciliation of transfer and allocation shipments by uploading a spreadsheet.
- Configure bulk upload templates specific to your retailer.
- New system parameters have been added to support disabling the available inventory validation when processing warehouse-sourced transfers created and managed through the external interface, customer orders, and allocations uploaded from an external system.
Technical Enhancements
- Improvements to Stock Ledger and Stock Count Record Management; merchandising now only creates records in the stock ledger or for stock counts where necessary, based on the location’s department or subclass.
- CFAS attributes can now be activated online, rather than through the backend process.
- A new data conversion tool that consumes data files from legacy solutions, loading them into pre-production environment staging tables, then using data integrity checks and business validations to eventually promote converted data to a production environment.
- Greater visibility of files during stock count upload and sales processing.
- Automatic temporary data archive when purging.
- Improvements to Customer Configuration Preservation when patches are applied to merchandising.
So, is it worth migrating to V19?
It’s a difficult question to answer holistically. Really, it’s going to depend on your organisation’s use of the RMS right now, and in the future.
For full documentation and more analysis of new Oracle Retail features in V19, see Trevor North’s article in the Cloud Generators blog here - http://cloudgenerators.com/oracle-retail-v19-is-out/
elfware Automation is an IT company specialising in the use of no code and low code to resolve IT Bottlenecks and reduce Total Costs of Ownership for Oracle Retail clients globally.
