Retail Industry Standards!
I wanted to highlight the importance of standards today. Industry standards are extremely important in many ways and importantly in providing better customer experience. Imagine what would have happened if every screw had a different head, we would have been buying a new screw driver every time we bought a screw. Thanks to some forward thinking by folks, they have standardized on the screw driver head, which helps in using a single screw driver irrespective of its brand or type. You can argue that, well we’ve Phillips head and we’ve the flat head, etc. My point is that they are still standards, may be there are more standards than there ought to be, but still for all practical purposes owning couple screw drivers will solve most of our daily needs.
How does this relate to retail? That brings me to my actual point. Retail vertical also has some good standards that you should be aware of, ensure your solution complies with them and if you are a retailer, you should insist that the solution you are selecting complies with them. Standards help in standardizing information exchange between disparate systems and also help in plug-and-play type scenario. Overall they reduce cost provide freedom to select best of breed applications and finally enhance customer experience.
NRF (National Retail Federation) has a standards body called ARTS (Association of Retail Technology Standards), which works on creating standards for the retail technology. ARTS mainly focuses on four areas,
- UnifiedPOS
- IXRetail
- Data Model
- RFP
There are subcommittees focusing on each of these areas. For example UPOS which includes both JPOS and OPOS (Ole for POS) defines the device interoperability standards between a Point-of-Service terminal and a peripherals such as a scanner or printer. IXRetail builds on the ARTS Data Model to develop standard XML schemas and message sets to ease Application to Application (A to A) integration within a retail enterprise. The data model is described a a logical description of the data and its entity relationships required to support a retail enterprise and finally the RFP subcommittee focuses on creating Request For Price Quotations (RFP’s) standards to save the retailer community time and effort by providing a starting place for the development of individual RFP documents.
I highly encourage you to learn more about the standards in the retail industry, participate and ensure your solutions comply with them. Microsoft is fully committed to the standards and actively participates and contributes to the advancement of the standards. In addition Microsoft platform supports the POS for .NET inherently.
To show the continued commitment, Microsoft recently created Food services sub committee working with ARTS’s IXRetail group created to focus on Food services standards. Currently I chair the sub-committee and if you are in the food services industry I strongly urge your participation in this committee.
As always welcome your feedback and comments!
