2 July 2009

ProfitBase president Larry LeBlanc interviews Richard Mader, executive director of ARTS and Edvard Gundersen, chair of the ARTS data warehouse standard committee.

Creating a new global standard is a major challenge and the Association for Retail Technology Standards has been doing it for the past 16 years. Founded in 1993, ARTS, a division of the US National Retail Federation, is a international membership organisation of retailer and vendors whose mission is to enable the low cost, rapid deployment of technology in retail by reducing integration efforts through platform independent and vendor neutral standards. The standards ARTS produces are a result of thousands of hours of experts applying their knowledge of the industry, its information requirements, and understanding trends in retailing and technology.

How do you identify a good candidate for a standards effort?
RM: The need for a standard is determined when multiple people or companies find they are doing the same thing in different ways with different degrees of success. Our job is to keep an open ear and listen and when we hear of a problem area or an area of focus that come up repeadily then we investigate deeper. We attend many users group meetings during the year with both vendors and retailers in attendance and during these meetings it becomes pretty obvious where we can apply our efforts to develop a standard.

I’m sure there are many candidate every year, but what are the key criteria you use to decide when to go forward with a new standard?
RM: We work to identified needs that are often solved with sharing tips and suggestions, formally documented as best practices. We look for ongoing needs that will be faced by multiple companies that can be solved by implementable code and or procedures that can be defined in a standards. For example integrating the data from multiple sources that is required to successfully implement a workforce management system, people, budget, projected sales volume, or building a data warehouse to calculate KPIs for retailer are areas that every retailer must deal with. While there will be different vendors, for retailers in various segments doing slightly different functions the data requirements are consistant, or should we say standard. The ARTS Board analyses these needs and determines if the investment in creating a standard will produce expense and time saving that exceed development cost and have a reasonable life expectancy. Only those ideas that meet this hurdle and have several companies committed to support the development and then implement are approved for standard.

How does an idea become a approved standards work group?
RM: Once an idea is approved by the ARTS Board or technical committe as having merit for the retail community, a work group is normally formed within three months or less at the following ARTS quarterly meeting. Other ideas can take six or more months depending on how quickly we can research the industry need, return on investment and obtain sufficient volunteer participants. Tough economic times limits the amount of volunteer resouces made available to ARTS. Sometimes we must complete an in-progress project before we have sufficient resources to launch another.

All the long hard work in developing standards turns quickly to joy when companies send you anowledgements of the benefits they received by using the standards

Richard Mader , ARTS Richard, can you explain in more detail the start-up process for a work group?
RM: Once approved by the ARTS Board, the project is announced to the membership and posted on our public LinkedIn site to solicit vendors and retailers to volunteer to participate in the development. Once three or more companies agree to participate, one must be a retailer, a work team is formed. The first duty of the team is to elect a chair, who ensures minutes are maintained and that the ARTS intellectual property policy is followed in the development process. The team then has 90 days to develop a charter and scoping document describing in exact language the process that will be included in the technical specification. The charter is reviewed and when approved by the appropiate technical committee. Then the work group has regular meetings to develop the technical specification for the standard. The process from from start to the first work group meeting can take three to six months. The process of developing the standard can take up to two years.

Who does the bulk of the work?
RM: We depend heavily on vendor companies that are equal members within the ARTS organisation provide the majority of the resources. Even in very hot projects like development of the Warehouse Data Model vendors provide the majority of the resource. Limited retailer volunteers are used to stipluate requirements and review work product drafts for accuracy and completness. ARTS staff resource have the responsiblity do produce the documents. Vendors and retailer contribute ideas and draft of components but our staff produces the documents for work group review.

Edvard, I’d like to switch focus and talk about what was the motivation behind the data warehouse standard?
EG: Business intelligence has become in recent years a major focus for retailers, so we wanted to expand the knowledge base about data warehousing and business intelligence to help retailers reduce the time, cost and risk associated with their deployments. Standardisation on certain measures and key performance indicators will open the possibility to pre-configured software solutions that are designed using ARTS standards and which are very easy to install.

How long did it take to release the first version of the data warehouse standard?
EG: I was not involved from the very beginning, but my understanding is the process took approximately two years. Most of my involvement was during the last year where we had two on-site working meeting and many web meetings. It takes thousands of hours of work to produce a standard.

How do you assure the market that these standards are vendor neutral?
RM: The first assurance is the ARTS intellectual property (IP) policy developed over four years by attorneys from ARTS, Epson, IBM and Microsoft. The policy insures vendor IP is not embedded in an ARTS standards thereby protecting the implementers from future license fees. Since all work teams require at least three companies the team members monitor themselves to be sure the resulting standard is vendor neutral.

What is the most challenging part of the process?
RM: Managing to a schedule with volunteer resources is very challanging. The people who do the bulk of the work also have full time day jobs and as we all know businesses today have lean staffing and priorities change often. Volunteer commitments can sometimes quickly drop to the bottom of the priority list. This forces us to develop in phases. For example, phase one of the data warehouse standard was limited to sales. Subsequent phases will address other areas.

What is the most rewarding part of bringing a standard to release?
EG: It is very satisfying to me to see the quality and relevancy of the standard to each retailer that I talk with. Their feedback that it is helping them to save time and money makes the hard work worthwhile.
RM: All the long hard work in developing standards turns quickly to joy when companies send you anowledgements of the benefits they received by using the standards. When El Corte Ingles says to internationalise your POS system using ARTS and Urban Outfitters uses the ARTS Item schema to intergate applications, it’s a great feeling. Just the fact that the ARTS standards have been downloaded over 31,000 times by individuals at over 3,100 companies in 80 countries is a great reward. Wow – imagine how many hours have been saved and customers provided better services because of ARTS.

Richard Mader is executive director of ARTS. He has over 30 years’ experience in retail information management with various retailers and was the founding chairman of ARTS while CIO of Boscov’s. Edvard Gundersen is a senior retail consultant with ProfitBase, a retail business intelligence vendor. He is currently chair of the ARTS data warehouse standards committee. Larry LeBlanc is ProfitBase’s president.

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