ARTS Plans: More Business Stimulus

The ARTS board met during the 99th NRF Annual Convention & EXPO to determine ARTS’ development priorities for 2010. While ARTS makes a point of seeking input from members to guide these discussions, the board itself is composed of retailers and vendors that are in a good position to give direction. In a change of strategy, the board decided that, for 2010, ARTS should allocate more of its energy and resources to creating products that have a direct, positive impact on the business.

To offer additional guidance, ARTS will document business processes starting at the conceptual level through detailed best practices prior to the development of standards. Business processes are what you automate with computer applications: By incorporating the hundreds of use cases already within our XML schemas, we will help you to identify the correct processes for your business model. The most effective implementations using our schemas and technical standards begin with defining the “right” processes.

To illustrate this point, several months ago ARTS began to develop data standards for product lifecycle management (some call it private label management, while others say it is simply managing the manufacturing process). Peter Burrows, a member of the ARTS board and, until recently, CIO of Adidas, felt it could be any of the above, based on having managed the implementation and operation of multiple PLM applications.

In his opinion, in order to determine the “right” implementation approach and guide the development of data standards, the first step must be to document the process lifecycle. Work is already under way to do so, and PLM will be the first project where ARTS defines processes before developing technical standards, white papers and RFPs.

Information clearinghouse
At the convention, several presentations indicated that retail business growth would require international expansion. In November, STORES’ cover story, “Markets with Muscle,” added Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico to the list of better-known growth markets.

Business rules vary by country and regions within them: Wouldn’t it be great to have a single source to identify these legal and cultural differences to better evaluate if your business philosophy and practices align, as well as to forecast the cost of process and application changes? ARTS has members based in more than 20 countries that operate in nearly all of them — this year, we will employ this diverse resource to gather and share this sort of information with members.

Data security and PCI compliance continue to be major concerns to most retailers and their vendors, partners in protecting customer data. ARTS has analyzed the latest methods and applications for securing data and going beyond PCI requirements to allow you to sleep better. We are organizing an effort to update our published PCI best practices by creating a managed website where members can share information on these topics and begin working toward standards for end-to-end encryption.

The ink is not yet dry on version 1.0 of our Cloud Computing white paper and ARTS already has a team adding information on successful cloud implementations, thereby offering direct guidance on the best processes to automate via cloud. And developing a Mobile Blueprint to guide retailers in the profitable use of this new technology remains a top priority.

Accomplishing the ARTS 2010 agenda to provide more direct business support is highly dependent on active participation from retailers and their vendor partners. If any or all of these projects have value for your business, join ARTS and contribute your experience to one of our teams or committees.

Contact us at ARTS@nrf.com for more information on membership and work teams.