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From November
2007
By Richard Mader
One of the showcase presentations at the
fifth annual NRF-ARTS Retail Technology Summit
last month in Brussels was by Galeries
Lafayette, one of the world’s destination
fashion department stores.
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Entitled “Delivering Premium Customer Service
with SOA Simplicity” and presented by head of
systems Matthew Stolarow and enterprise
architect Yves Pastor, the session described how
Galeries Lafayette improved customer service and
increased sales and profits with a simple
application based on service-oriented
architecture (SOA) and ARTS standards.
France offers tax-free shopping to non-residents
on purchases totaling 75 euros or more. If you
have ever waited in line to process a VAT
refund, however, you realize the tax-free offer
is not as attractive as it first appears. In
addition, the generation of tax refund forms can
be onerous for retailers.
With more than 40 percent of sales at Galeries
Lafayette’s Paris store coming from foreign
visitors, the mission was to automate the tax
refund in order to encourage increased shopping
by tourists and to identify and target eligible
customers. The Paris store alone generates more
than 380,000 tax-refund forms each year, so
simplifying this process would be a labor saver
for the store, too.
Changes necessary
POS application changes would be necessary but
not easily accomplished, given a very old system
not readily able to communicate with other
applications. “No problem,” was the reply from
E-Laser, the IT subsidiary of Galeries
Lafayette. Its approach was to use SOA to build
a bridge from the legacy POS application using
ARTS XML schemas. To convert the transactions
from the old POS application to the ARTS POSlog
XML format, they used XSLT, which is a language
for creating XML documents based on the content
of other XML documents.
Galeries Lafayette went beyond XML conversion to
create a simple first-phase SOA architecture,
including an enterprise service bus (ESB) to
transport the XML data to wherever it would be
needed in the application and web services
implemented with the open standards SOAP and
WSDL to invoke the tax rebate application at any
terminal or server.
This allowed them to introduce new functionality
with little or no impact on the legacy
applications and put into place an
infrastructure based on standards that could be
extended for future functionality. The business
now understands SOA is not technology hype, but
common sense for better IT support.
This successful use of ARTS standards within SOA
validates the work ARTS is doing to assist
retailers to create a more efficient IT
environment through SOA. The ARTS SOA Blueprint
and Retail Transaction Interface (RTI) are just
two special products being created to support
retailers’ use of SOA.
Coming to the Big Show
The Blueprint, scheduled to be released in
January at the NRF Annual Convention, will fully
describe the requirements of the optimum SOA
architecture for retail, as well as define
standard business functions to be developed as
web services. RTI exposes POS sales transaction
functions as a set of SOA services, allowing
existing POS sales transaction functions to be
used by other customer-facing and store
associate touch-point applications.
There are 15 ARTS XML schemas available for use
in the public domain. Galeries Lafayette used
POSlog, but others -- like item, customer,
inventory and employee -- are ready for you
depending on your business need. In addition to
the XML schemas, the ARTS dictionary and model
contain more than 5,000 retail terms for
retailers to create standard messages.
ARTS is your source for SOA education and
implementation assistance. If you are not a
member, contact us at arts@nrf.com to discuss
the value of joining. |
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