Stores Magazine - November 2007 - (Page 108) CONSIDER THIS / ARTS UPDATE Premium Customer Service with SOA Simplicity 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. Entitled “Delivering Premium Customer Service with SOA Simplicity” and presented SOA is not technology hype, by head of systems Matthew Stolarow and but common sense for better enterprise architect Yves Pastor, the session IT support described how Galeries Lafayette improved customer service and increased sales and profits with a simple application based on any terminal or server. service-oriented architecture (SOA) and This allowed them to introduce new funcARTS standards. tionality with little or no impact on the legaFrance offers tax-free shopping to non-rescy applications and put into place an infraidents on purchases totaling ?75 or more. If structure based on standards that could be you have ever waited in line to process a extended for future functionality. The busiVAT refund, however, you realize the taxness now understands SOA is not technolofree offer is not as attractive as it first apgy hype, but common sense for better IT pears. In addition, the generation of tax reRichard Mader is support. fund forms can be onerous for retailers. executive director of ARTS. This successful use of ARTS standards With more than 40 percent of sales at Gawithin SOA validates the work ARTS is leries Lafayette’s Paris store coming from doing to assist retailers to create a more efficient IT enviforeign visitors, the mission was to automate the tax refund ronment through SOA. The ARTS SOA Blueprint and Retail in order to encourage increased shopping by tourists and Transaction Interface (RTI) are just two special products to identify and target eligible customers. The Paris store being created to support retailers’ use of SOA. alone generates more than 380,000 tax-refund forms each year, so simplifying this process would be a labor saver for Coming to the Big Show the store, too. The Blueprint, scheduled to be released in January at the Changes necessary NRF Annual Convention, will fully describe the requirePOS application changes would be necessary but not ments of the optimum SOA architecture for retail, as well easily accomplished, given a very old system not readily as define standard business functions to be developed as able to communicate with other applications. “No problem,” web services. RTI exposes POS sales transaction funcwas the reply from E-Laser, the IT subsidiary of Galeries tions as a set of SOA services, allowing existing POS sales Lafayette. Its approach was to use SOA to build a bridge transaction functions to be used by other customer-facing from the legacy POS application using ARTS XML and store associate touch-point applications. schemas. To convert the transactions from the old POS apThere are 15 ARTS XML schemas available for use in the plication to the ARTS POSlog XML format, they used public domain. Galeries Lafayette used POSlog, but others XSLT, which is a language for creating XML documents -- like item, customer, inventory and employee -- are ready based on the content of other XML documents. for you depending on your business need. In addition to Galeries Lafayette went beyond XML conversion to crethe XML schemas, the ARTS dictionary and model contain ate a simple first-phase SOA architecture, including an more than 5,000 retail terms for retailers to create standard enterprise service bus (ESB) to transport the XML data messages. to wherever it would be needed in the application and ARTS is your source for SOA education and implementaweb services implemented with the open standards tion assistance. If you are not a member, contact us at SOAP and WSDL to invoke the tax rebate application at arts@nrf.com to discuss the value of joining. 108 STORES / NOVEMBER 2007 WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG
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