• Industry Bodies & Memberships

ARTS Membership

Glue Reply is a member of ARTS, which is a membership open to retailers from all segments: general merchandise, food service, forecourt, etc. and vendor partners that provide software and hardware to the retail industry. There are no classes of membership, all members have equal rights to participate and vote on committees and work teams.

Membership in ARTS enables members to express their point-of-view and discuss ideas in the creation of standards, technical reports that benefit the worldwide retailing community. ARTS standards are referenced and implemented in more than 70 countries. Creating global standards requires participation by members of the information technology community; retailers, application developers and hardware companies from many countries. The ARTS membership is almost 50% from outside our US base as a division of the NRF. Active participation by international companies is facilitated by web collaboration and annual meetings in Europe and Asia Pacific.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) of the National Retail Federation is a retailer-driven membership organisation dedicated to creating an open environment where both retailers and technology vendors work together to create international retail technology standards. Established in 1993, ARTS strives to ensure that technology works to enhance a retailer’s ability to implement store-level business solutions.

Develop True Open Systems Standards that:

• Provide for Cost Effective Integrated Application Solutions that Protect Investment
• Allow "Best of Breed" Hardware and Software Components that will require minimal interfacing
• Enable the Utilisation of Hardware and Software Technology at the Rate it Develops
• Create a global system of retail technology standards through a series of common interfaces

To date, ARTS has developed four standards of significance: the Retail Data Model , Unified Point of Service (Unified POS), ARTS XML schemes to integrate applications within the retail enterprise and standard Requests for Proposal (RFP’s) to guide retailer selection of applications and provide a development guide for vendors.

The standard Data Model contains all the data definitions required to develop the computer applications required to operate a modern retailing business. The Model ranges from POS transaction processing through Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM).

The Model was developed in four layers:

• Scope Document - describes in business language the retailing enterprise and the functions that have to be supported by computerized applications to achieve success.
• Business Process Relationships - relates data requirements to the specific retailing applications
• Logical Data Relationships - explains through diagrams the relationships between business functions and the data components. These relationship diagrams save thousands of hours in developing applications.
• Data Definitions - of the more than 2,500 elements of data to ensure that the developers whether vendor or your internal staff completely understand the business application.

<< back