Wednesday 22 August 2012

Oracle Retail aka Retek Explained

Oracle Retail aka Retek is a broad suite of Oracle Products for the Retail Industry for managing Merchandising, Inventory Management and Inventory Planning. Originally called Retek and renamed to Oracle Retail after the acquitition by Oracle in 2005. The suite has gone through a considerable architectural changes with every release of the product with the latest being V13.2.x using Oracle latest middleware techonologies, Weblogic 11g to host all of the indvidual components in a web based solution.

The suite contains a lot of individual products that can be used as standalone products integrating with the companies exsiting merchandising systems either inhouse or off the shelf. The major ones are as listed below, for a full list of products visit Oracle Documentation http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/documentation/13xdoc-520375.html

Core Mechandising Suite:

ORMS --> Merchandising system and is the heart of the suite
ORPM --> Price Management
OReIM --> Inventory Management
ORAlloc --> Allocations
OReSA --> Sales Audit (Is part of the RMS)
ORTM  --> Trade Management (Again part of RMS)
ORDW  --> Data Warehouse (OBIEE Front End)
ORETL --> RDW specific ETL tool. Now phased out with ODI in V13.2

*ORDW : Now replaced by a new product called Retail Analytics in v13.2

Store Systems:

ORSIM --> Store Inventory Management
ORPOS --> Point of Sale system

Warehouse:

ORWMS  --> Warehouse Management system

Strategic Products:

RPAS : The Planning Application server on top of which other specific products seat on like th eone below.

AIP   --> Advanced Inventory Planning
MFP --> Merchandise Financial Planning
CM   --> Category Management

Integration:

RIB  --> Retail Integration Bus, the main integration toll for all the individual Products. Its a java message based tool.
SOA --> Oracle SOA is also actively pushed in the more recent releases for Integration activities.


One of the biggest challenges for a Retail Infrastructure consultant or as they are more popularly known, Retail DBA  is to manage and Install each product individually. Although not the most difficult thing to do but a very cumbersome and time consuming activity as keeping track of each product can get a bit overwhelming with each one having its own technical Implemetation which unlike Oracle's E-business suite does not have a common Installer for the whole suite. However Oracle is working on standardising the Product set. While the main RMS system is entirely based on Oracle Forms but the rest of the products are JAVA based but none sharing a common GUI. Oracle lately is pushing Oracle Retail Workspace, a Retail Specific Portal allowing a comman place to manage and make available the suite from a platform with real dashboard capabilities.

7 comments:

  1. "One of the biggest challenges for a Retail Infrastructure consultant ... is to manage and Install each product individually. Although not the most difficult thing to do but a very cumbersome and time consuming activity as keeping track of each product can get a bit overwhelming with each one having its own technical implementation"

    This is one of the reasons I have created Cloudgenerators.com, a fully automated process to deploy the Oracle Retail suite on Amazon Web Services. It currently takes about 3 hours to do a full install of MOM v16 with OID, OAM and BI Publisher and we also have RIB/RSB, SIM, WMS and Webcentre on the way this year.

    You say it's not the hardest thing to install but i would disagree. There are hundreds of pages of installation guides, white papers and Oracle support docs for each version. Getting to the login prompt is relatively straight forward if you follow everything to the letter but there is often a long way to go after this to get a working environment. This is the problem we have solved by creating a consistent, secure and automated build process.

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  2. Hi All,

    Please any one suggest how to Integrate with Sterling Commerce with Oracle Retek...needs little urgent

    Thanks and Regards,
    Tony

    ReplyDelete
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