released three new standards, each offering opportunities for savings as well as the potential to increase sales through better service.

The first to be released was the Tax Transaction XML technical specification. The complexity of U.S. sales taxes, with some locations allowing three or more jurisdictions to tax a single sale, has made it practically impossible for retailers to maintain the current tax tables in their POS systems.

Tax Transaction simplifies accurate tax collection by allowing retailers to communicate with ADP Taxware or Vertex to access tax rules for updating internal applications — or pass sales transactions to these specialists to calculate the proper tax via standardized XML messages. This clearly reduces the internal IT workload and eliminates overlooked updates.

Tax Transaction can also have a positive impact on reducing the time and expense of tax audits and supports your Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. By creating a log file that integrates with reporting systems, the number of audits can be reduced and, when they do arise, can be resolved quickly.

SOA services
Retail Transaction Interface (RTI) is the first ARTS XML schema specifically designed to work in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). RTI exposes POS sales transaction functions as a set of SOA services, allowing them to be used by other customer-service solutions such as self-checkout, fuel at grocery stores, kiosks, shop on the web, store within a store, portable shopper and mobile line buster. This enables retailers to offer additional customer services quickly and inexpensively, while maintaining a consistent look and feel.

To ensure that RTI will work for retailers “out of the box,” IBM implemented the RTI technology for a client in Germany in tandem with the creation of the standard. This “live” testing of developing standards is a practice ARTS will utilize wherever possible to allow our members to rely on our products, particularly those supporting SOA.

Last but by no means least, the ARTS Warehouse Data Model is now available to support improved retail business intelligence. The warehouse is a data store designed to support any of the many Business Intelligence analysis applications available in the market — the makers of many of which (Teradata, Quanitsense, Retail Anywhere and ProfitBase) contributed to its development. The warehouse model is derived from the widely-implemented ARTS Data Model that stores all the operational data required to operate a successful retail business.

Norwegian testing
The ARTS mission in developing the warehouse model was to reduce the two principal challenges to supplying data to the business for decision making: ensuring data is accurate by identifying the correct source, and allowing a timely and smooth flow of updated information to the warehouse. The warehouse model also contains sample key performance indicators (KPIs) to guide retailers in selecting the proper data to store in the warehouse. As with RTI, Norwegian member ProfitBase piloted the ARTS data warehouse during its development, so we are confident it works as designed.

These releases fulfill the promise of standards: allowing retailers to adopt new technologies and enhance customer service, while actually driving costs out of your operation. Why not take a moment and review our website (www.nrf-arts.org) or e-mail me at maderr@nrf.com to see how ARTS can help you weather the current stormy economy and emerge stronger than ever.