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FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE ARTS Announces
International XML Standard Washington,
DC, November 21, 2006
–
It’s no industry secret that retailers, manufacturers and their suppliers can
save billions of dollars annually by adopting standards for the automated
exchange of product content such as pictures, videos, captions for use in
shelf-edge and digital signs, catalogs, e-commerce websites, kiosks, etc. The
Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), a division of the National
Retail Federation, today announced the release of an XML schema to enable
retailers and their suppliers to more efficiently create and manage images and
text used to present products to consumers. AMR Research recently estimated the
annual cost of these processes to be in excess of $5 billion USD. This standard
will facilitate the efficient creation and exchange of both images and text used
in presenting products to consumers. “This
standard will help retailers by reducing costs of the acquisition and
maintenance of product content. Manufacturers will see much improvement in their
ability to guide the way their products are sold to consumers,” said Richard
Mader, Executive Director of ARTS. “The
ultimate winner is the consumer, who will see the impact of reduced costs and
better information about the products in which they are interested.”
The new
standard replaces the previously-released Digital Asset Management (DAM) schema
and was developed by a diverse ARTS committee which included retailers such as
Blockbuster, Circuit City, El Cortes Inglés, RadioShack, Reebok, and Target,
and suppliers such as AccessVia, Clicks & Mortar, Datavantage, Gladson
Interactive, IBM, Interwoven, and Mars Interactive. The PCM v2
release will allow trading partners to standardize how they create and exchange
images and text used in presenting products to consumers, and could ultimately
lead to an entirely new category of applications and processes that reduce costs
while increasing the quality and accuracy of product information. While much of
the development has focused on the supply chain requirements for item
information, this is the first global effort intended to allow synchronization
of product content beyond those basic transactional elements. “E-commerce
kicked off the product content crisis with the first large-scale requirement for
images of all retail products,” noted Dean Sleeper, CEO of AccessVia and Chair
of the PCM work team. “The rise of multi-channel retailing and the emergence
of new consumer messaging strategies are rapidly amplifying the challenges and
costs.” “The
dramatic growth of internet shopping has not been lost on ARTS,” said Ann
McCool Chair of ARTS Board. “PCM can be used with the recently-released ARTS
Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) schema that communicates product data
standardizing images and data. And
the Master Data Management RFP is a great guide for product information
management and global data sync.” The
standard is specified in XML, the data language of the internet. Anyone
involved in the retail business that needs to work with comprehensive product
content will benefit from this specification. PCM v2 offers seamless integration
with other ARTS standards such as Item, Price and the recently released
Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE), as well as other global standards such as GS1. 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,
independent stores, chain restaurants, drug stores and grocery stores as well as
the industry's key trading partners of retail goods and services. NRF represents
an industry with more than 1.6 million U.S. retail establishments, more than 24
million employees - about one in five American workers - and 2005 sales of $4.4
trillion. As the industry umbrella group, NRF also represents more than 100
state, national and international retail associations. www.nrf.com. ###
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