• Alternate Storage of POS Transaction Data

• Enhancements to TLOG Storage Optimization

• Enhancements to TLOG Data Model With System ID

• Enhanced Search of POS Workbench

• Enhanced Support of Season Integration

• Analyzing Forecasts with New SAP Fiori App

• Generating Intraday Forecasts

• Support for SAP Merchandise Planning for Retail

• Analyzing Product Affinity

• Importing Time-Dependent Article Hierarchies from SAP ERP

• Creating Geographical Location Hierarchies

• Enhancements to Current Inventory Position with Sales Document Data

• Simplified Integration with Inventory Visibility

• No new features for this release.

• You can use the existing functionality for the new Generating Intraday Forecasts feature of UDF (see above).

POS Data Transfer and Audit

• Various enhancements were made to improve performance of structured articles.

Multichannel Transaction Data Management

• No additional improvements for this release.

• Performance

  • New revisions of the Unified Demand Forecast application function library (UDF AFL, software component version UDFAFL_INST 100) have been released. For more information, see SAP Note 2050229.

  • You can now configure the length of the demand history to be considered for demand modeling. For one, this allows you to improve run times by limiting the amount of input data. Additionally, you can ensure that modeling (or the understanding of history) runs only on data that is still relevant for your forecast scenario.

    To do this, you simply specify the desired number of days in the new Days in Modeling Period option under  Cross-Application Components Demand Data Foundation Modeling and Forecasting Define Modeling Control Settings .

  • The performance of the virtual data model for point-of-sale data (time series source POS_VDM) has been enhanced. For more information about this VDM, see Virtual Data Model: Point-of-Sale (POS) Data.

  • If tasks fail during modeling or forecasting jobs or during the calculation of hierarchical priors, such tasks can now be resubmitted automatically for processing. For performance reasons, we recommend that you use a conservative approach when configuring the number of times that you want the system to retry. For more information, see the Monitoring Jobs section under Schedule Model and Forecast.

• Short Life Cycle Products

  • You can now run modeling and forecasting on multiple product types in the same client at the same time. For example, your assortment might include never-out-of-stock (NOS) products and short life cycle products, both within the same category. Both product types have different characteristics (such as the length of their sales period or their replenishment type), which should be considered in forecasting.

    You can now configure this product type at the level of the individual product location. New demand model definitions are available for this, determined based on the material requirements planning (MRP) type.

    You can configure the model definitions for your product types using the following Customizing activities under  Cross-Application Components Demand Data Foundation Modeling and Forecasting :

    • Define Model Categories (new)

    • Assign Material Requirements Planning Types to Model Categories (new)

    • Assign Demand Model Definitions (enhanced)

     Caution

    If you are upgrading from a lower release where you are using custom model definitions, please be aware that action must be taken to ensure correct model definition assignments in the current release.

    For more information on this as well as integration and implementation considerations, see Forecast Multiple Product Types.

    End of the caution.

• Forecast Accuracy

  • The outlier detection has been enhanced to exclude outliers observed during holiday seasons and offers. Outlier detection is a preprocessing step during demand modeling. For more information, see the Process section under Unified Demand Forecast.

• The POS sales time series (table /DMF/TS_PS, time series source POS_TS) has been enhanced to include the order channel as well as multiple season details for seasonal products. The following table fields have been added: ORDER_CHNL_ID, SEASON_YEAR, SEASON_ID, COLLECTION_ID, THEME_ID. For more information about this time series, see Sales.

• You can now maintain number ranges for assortment modules as used by SAP Assortment Planning for Retail. The new Customizing activity Maintain Number Range for Assortment Modules has been created under  Cross-Application Components Demand Data Foundation Data Maintenance Assortment Modules .

• No additional improvements for this release.

• The documentation of the following Business Add-Ins has been enhanced with the underlying virtual data models used to read master data:

  Technical Name	Description
  /OSA/PRODUCT_DAO	(Retrieve Product Data)
  /OSA/DEPARTMENT_DAO	(Retrieve Department Data)

• For an overview of the released revisions of the on-shelf availability application function library (POS AFL, software component version POSAFL_INST 100), see SAP Note 2056102.