The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has released new IXRetail XML schemas to enable retailers to use common methods and maintain consistent and accurate data for all systems that create, manage or consume item and price data within the retail enterprise. The new Item Maintenance schema, the 10th standard XML schema developed by ARTS, is intended to communicate Item data from a central repository to stores ensuring synchronization of item data, a significant challenge for all retailers.
"ARTS IXRetail was founded to develop XML schemas to integrate applications within the retail enterprise," said Richard Mader Executive Director of ARTS. "When retailers and their software vendors asked ARTS to develop an Item and revised Price schema to complement POSlog, we proceeded carefully to avoid conflict or duplication with other standard groups working in the business to business space."
ARTS and the Uniform Code Council, Inc. (UCC) have worked together to ensure the Item schema incorporates the EAN. UCC's basic identification numbers, the GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) and the GLN (Global Location Number). Use of the GTIN and GLN enables the retailer's internal systems to communicate effectively with their trading partners.
"Through our cooperation a retailer can use the ARTS Item schema for internal operations and generate records which can be used for data synchronization," said Al Garton of the UCC. "This is a practical example of how standards groups can work together to enable a single implementation to serve multiple functions."
The Item Maintenance schema can be used to create, update, or delete item information held within store systems such as Point of Sale, Inventory Management, Layaway Management, or Returns Processing.
Version 2 of the Price schema complements the Item Maintenance schema by adding the downloading of prices and price rules to version 1 that was limited to Price Lookup capabilities. Price v2 supports special and promotional pricing based on basket, customer, time, location and other retailer established criteria.
Development of the Item schema was lead by Tim Hood, VP of Solution Architecture for Triversity. "Our work team took on a tremendous challenge. Item information is at the very heart of most retail systems and a great deal of research was required to ensure the schema contained all necessary data," he said. "Working with the UCC was of tremendous assistance."
Work team members included representatives from IBM, Datavantage, PCATS, Microsoft, Target and the IXRetail team in Japan. Ron McEvoy, COO of Soft Solutions, a retail software company based in France and certified by EAN.fr, made a special effort to ensure that the ARTS Item schema included the data necessary to support European customers.
Price version 2 was developed under the leadership of Dean Sleeper, CEO of AccessVia with the able assistance of Dave VanHorn of SofTechnics and representatives from El Corte Ingles, Blockbuster, Retek, Soft Solutions, Datavantage and Clicks and Mortar Consulting. Price v2 can serve as the distribution vehicle for Price Lookup data, a significant enhancement over v1.
The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) is an international membership organization dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards. Since 1993, ARTS has been delivering application standards exclusively to the retail industry. ARTS has three standards: The Standard Relational Data Model, UnifiedPOS and IXRetail. Membership is open to all members of the international technology community- retailers from all industry segments, application developers and hardware companies. www.nrf-arts.org
The National Retail Federation is the world's largest retail trade association, with membership that comprises all retail formats and channels of distribution including department, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet and independent stores as well as the industry's key trading partners of retail goods and services. NRF represents an industry with more than 1.4 million U.S. retail establishments, more than 23 million employees - about one in five American workers - and 2004 sales of $4.1 trillion. As the industry umbrella group, NRF also represents more than 100 state, national and international retail associations
