ARTS Welcomes New Members

ARTS at the 95^th NRF Annual Convention & EXPO

15-18 January 2006, New York City

• Visit the ARTS Pavilion, Booth 867 on EXPO Show Floor

  This year’s ARTS Standards Pavilion will feature demonstrations of rapid integration and agility by 12 software suppliers using ARTS standards.  Scenarios include: customer ordering on web, kisok or in-store; pricing to achieve maximum margin or minimum markdowns; and inventory management for accurate on-hand information by store.

  These Pavilion scenarios prove that multiple vendor applications can integrate easily using ARTS standard XML schemas.   The power and flexibility of applications incorporating ARTS standards makes changing components or adding data to support new business processes much easier.  Retailer that select applications based on our standards are able to measure implementations of business changes in days and weeks instead of months and years. 

  Other ARTS Activities Scheduled during the Convention:

   

• Sunday, January 15, 10:15 - 11:45 am

  Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About RFPs (But Were Afraid to Ask)

  When purchasing new applications, many companies don’t realize the work that goes into researching, developing and distributing an RFP and evaluating vendors’ responses to them. The ARTS-NRF Standard Request for Proposal program can help you reduce the time and cost of creating RFPs, choose the software that is “right” for you and guide you in developing better contracts.  This session will lead retailers through the steps of developing a successful RFP project from beginning to end. 

   

• Monday, January 16, 11:00am - 12:15pm, Big !deas Session Room 3D04

  ARTS Standard RFPs and Business Agility, Powered by ARTS

  Retailers that select applications based on our standards and using our Standard RFPs are able to measure implementations of business changes in days and weeks instead of months and years.  ARTS will unveil its newest RFP, Price Optimization, and demonstrate an implementation of an Agile Pricing application using ARTS standard XML schemas.

   

• ARTS to Release Price Optimization RFP at NRF Annual Convention

  ARTS will release the sixth in the series of Standard RFPs it has created in partnership with NRF.  Price Optimization has become a must-have application for retailers looking to maximize margins in today’s competitive environment.  The NRF-ARTS RFP was developed to help retailers select the best pricing solution for their business.  Learn more about the new RFP at the ARTS Update session, Monday, January 16 in room 3D04 on the EXPO floor of the NRF Annual Convention & EXPO.  See above for more information on this session.

• NRF Announces establishment of RFP Promotion Program to Support Development and Maintenance of Standard RFPs

  The RFP Promotion Program will be managed by ARTS and creates a partnership with consulting companies who agree to encourage use of NRF-ARTS RFP’s and to continually provide comments and updates to the standard RFPs so they remain state of the art.   NRF and ARTS will list members of the Promotion Program on the RFP webpage so retailers seeking assistance in RFP projects can select companies familiar with the standard RFPs.

   

• Retail Anywhere and SAP Show Commitment to Standards, Test Conformant

  ARTS is pleased to announce that Retail Anywhere has passed conformance for Data Model release 4.01 in six of the ten possible business functions.  Retail Anywhere has developed multiple applications using the Model to provide comprehensive and flexible solutions.  SAP has passed IXRetail conformance for generating the Item schema further demonstrating their commitment to standards based solutions.  SAP had previously passed conformance for POSlog.

Committee News

• ARTS Releases UnifiedPOS 1.10 for Review and Comment, Committee Elects New Chair

  This is a significant release that for the first time contains support for Biometric devices and Electronic Journal, and also has a separate implementation reference appendix for POS for .NET.  This is the sixth release of UnifiedPOS since the original specification to coordinate OPOS and JavaPOS was released.  ARTS also congratulates Harry McKinlay of Fujitsu Transaction Solutions on his election as chair of the UnifiedPOS.  Harry takes over from Boyd Dimmock of IBM who chaired the committee for the last five years and has watched UnifiedPOS grow into one of the world’s most widely adopted standards.

   

•  RETAILERS: ARTS Needs Your Input on WAMPOS

  Please stop by the ARTS Pavilion in Booth 867 at the NRF Annual Convention & EXPO to see a demonstration of the Web-Access Method for Point of Sale (WAMPOS) and to give us your suggestions for how to move forward with this proposed new standard.