STORES Magazine - February 2008 - (Page 69) CONSIDER THIS/ ARTS UPDATE At the Pavilion, State of the ARTS BY RICHARD MADER I could write another glowing review of what may have been the best NRF Annual Convention ever, but so many others have already done so and ARTS never follows — we prefer to lead. So let’s talk standards and how they can benefit your retail business in what is shaping up to be a challenging year. The recently published NRF-AMR Research Retail IT Budget Benchmarking Study indicates that the typical retail IT budget is now 1.9 to 2 percent of sales. Suppose ARTS could help reduce a 2 percent IT budget to 1.5 percent? If you are a $500 million retailer, that is a bottom-line contribution of $2.5 million. How can ARTS do this? Let’s review some of our activities at the BIG Show to learn what others are doing or planning to Richard Mader is executive do to lower their IT budgets. director of ARTS. Derrick Leggett, director of information services for AMC Multi-Cinema, stopped by the ARTS Pavilion to say that his company is using the ARTS Model and schema to manage its data environment, inputting and outputting ARTS standard data to dramatically lower its integration costs. The 15 ARTS XML schemas, all available at no charge, allow you to integrate applications in less time, implement new business processes faster and reduce your IT costs. without it. ARTS is developing a warehouse model to lower the cost of BI by simplifying the flow of data from point of capture through data warehouse to key performance indicator (KPI). Profitbase, an ARTS member based in Norway, announced a new BI product at the BIG show. To quote its press release, “by working with ARTS, defining standard KPIs and linking operational data sources to the data warehouse, [we] bring a cost effective, functionally rich BI solution to the retail marketplace.” Many guests stopped by the Pavilion to review the new ARTS warehouse model; perhaps you, too, should review it and see if it will lower your costs. As Albert Boscov, the retired CEO of Boscov’s Department Store, always taught, there are two sides to percentto-sales calculations — the numerator and denominator — and increased sales can lower the percentage. POS and BI Are POS hardware and application upgrades a big part of your IT budget? The ARTS UnifiedPOS standard allows you to add new devices without major modifications to your POS application. The Pavilion demonstration of web services POS, connecting devices to POS terminals easily within the SOA world, was critically reviewed by Toshiba TEC and Comota from Japan, who were impressed with the speed and ease of POS hardware and application integration. Don’t buy a total POS replacement without reviewing the possibility of upgrading only the devices or applications you need to serve your business needs. Does your IT budget contain a big line item for business intelligence (BI)? This is an excellent investment, as you simply cannot operate a large, profitable retail company WWW.STORES.ORG Video analytics Many Pavilion visitors were excited to see the potential video analytics has to increase sales by monitoring customer behavior, allowing retailers to target promotions and merchandise displays in accordance with the preferred customer flow through the store. With the soon-to-be-announced ARTS standard formats to analyze the data for accurate feedback, retailers can achieve double ROI from installed loss prevention video networks. Have you downloaded your copy of the ARTS SOA Blueprint and Best Practices? What are you waiting for? Every day, new ideas are presented that can improve sales and profit. The challenge is whether IT can implement these ideas swiftly and at reasonable expense to produce an acceptable ROI. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the new open IT infrastructure, can help you do this. At the BIG Show, IBM announced the Retail Integration Framework that works within an SOA environment to seed implementation of new business practices. IBM, like Oracle, SAP and other leading software providers, worked with ARTS to develop the Blueprint to enable you to fully exploit the benefits of SOA. See www.nrf-arts.org to learn more and to download the Blueprint. STORES / FEBRUARY 2008 69 http://www.nrf-arts.org http://WWW.STORES.ORG
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