• New Chair for ARTS Board

ARTS is pleased to announce that Percy “Cy” Young, Director of Store Systems for Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corporation, has been elected Chairman of the ARTS Board of Directors. Young replaces Ann McCool, who had served as Board Chair since 2004.  Ann will be greatly missed, having not only chaired the Board but lead development of the seven standard RFPs now available free of charge to members.  Cy has been involved for over 30 years in the development and/or maintenance of most of the Open Systems-based computer systems used by Burlington Coat Factory. Most recently he spearheaded Burlington's point-of-sale software upgrades to support electronic check acceptance, online returns management and online layaway management, the latter two utilizing the ARTS XML standards for data transfer.

• ARTS Board Approves formation of New Work Teams and Expansion of SOA Offerings

At their meeting at the NRF Annual Convention in New York, the Board approved formation of two new work teams and continuation of the SOA education program. 

The Standard Data Warehouse work team will report to the Data Model Commitee and its goals are to fully utilize existing ARTS XML schemas to feed data to the warehouse and synchronize all data definitions with the Data Model and Dictionary.  The SOA Blueprint project will supplement the education program by providing retailers specific direction for a successful SOA implementation and will operate as a work team of the ARTS XML Committee.

Other priorities for 2007 include:

• SOA Education Sessions in Europe and the West Coast of the United States

• Development of a half-day RFP education program to guide retailers in using the NRF-ARTS standard RFPs

• New and expanded RFP’s for 2007 including: POS Hardware, an update of the Workforce Management RFP and adding Task Management to it. 

• Work related to SOA was given top priority for ARTS XML along with developing a schema for tax rules and vendor management. 

• Data Model priorities were assigned to life cycle management, data warehouse and the ARTS Data Dictionary. 

Comments and suggestions on priorities or volunteering to serve on the RFP development  committee should be emailed to Richard Mader at MaderR@nrf.com.

• More SOA News

The SOA Blueprint project, approved by the Board in the January meeting, will present retailers with specific guidance for a successful SOA implementation.  The Blueprint work team held its first face to face meeting last week at the ARTS quarterly meetings and elected Greg Wilmer of Big Lots chair and David Dorf of Oracle Retail co-chair.  This work team has more than 15 members including Kohl’s, CSK Auto, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Cisco, Escalate Retail, and Softechnics.

• European Technology Council Spring Meeting, March 27 in London

The next meeting of the European Technology Council (ETC) is scheduled for March 27 in the London offices of Shell.  Agenda topics include SOA, PCI, Data Warehouse and planning for the 5^th Annual Retail Technology Summit conference in October 2007.  Attendance is open to IT management in EMEA, to learn more contact Karen Shunk at by email at shunkk@nrf.com or by calling +1.202.626.8140.

• UnifiedPOS Meeting, February 7-9, Atlanta

UnifiedPOS is developing release 1.12 to include RFID readers for release in January, 2008.  In the February meeting of UnifiedPOS it was agreed to develop a three step plan to move to Release 2.0 that will include web services capabilities (WSPOS) and device sharing.  Details of the plan, including release dates, is being developed.  Thanks to BearingPoint for hosting. To learn more or participate, please contact ARTS@nrf.com or plan now to attend the next meeting May 22 – 24, hosted by NRF in Washington DC.

• ARTS XML and Data Model Meetings, February 19 – 22, Phoenix

The most recent ARTS XML and Data Model committee meetings, hosted by SAP in Phoenix, were very productive, with more than 40 members in attendance.  Highlights of the meeting include: 

• First draft of the Work team Charter for SOA Blueprint

• Formation of a new Work teams for Transaction Tax Rules and POS Transaction Integration

• Outline for implementing Life Cycle Management starting with Data 6.0 

• David Waxberg of CSKAuto elected chair of the Standard Data Warehouse Work team.

Full minutes of the work team meeting as well as charters, draft charters and other documents for the all work teams are available for member review and comment on the ARTS webboard.

         Action Items

• Join the New Transaction Work Team

Tax rules for calculating taxes at POS are well defined within the Data Model; to convert this into actionable information via XML schemas and messages ARTS is forming a Transaction Tax Rules work team.  In the Phoenix meeting, Taxware a division of ADP, NSB, Oracle and Datavantage drafted a charter. Now they need volunteers to join the work team and develop the schemas.  The scope is international and will address both in store and e-commerce.  If you would like to join this team, email ARTS@nrf.com.

• New Name for SOA Standard Services – Retail Transaction Integration

The first business domains or integration scenarios will include:

• self checkout

• personal shopping devices

• line busting

• pay at the fuel pump

• multi-channel sales (reserve on the web, buy in the store) and

• kiosks (payment, photo printing). 

This work team will coordinate its efforts with the SOA Blueprint team.  The next step is to call for volunteers to form the work team and to define the charter for consideration by the ARTS Board.  Companies that have already volunteered are SAP, IBM, PCMS, NSB, Oracle and Escalate Retail.  To volunteer or for more information, email MaderR@nrf.com.

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