Burlington Coat Factory Executive Elected to Chair ARTS Board

For Immediate Release
Contact: Kathy Grannis or
Ellen Davis
(202) 783-7971
Email: grannisk@nrf.com or
davise@nrf.com  

Burlington Coat Factory Executive Elected to Chair ARTS Board 

Washington, DC, February 21, 2007 – The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) today announced that Percy “Cy” Young, Director of Store Systems for Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corporation, has been elected Chairman of the ARTS Board of Directors. Young replaces Ann McCool, who served as Chairwoman since 2004. 

“ARTS is indeed fortunate to have a person with such a wealth of experience and knowledge in Retail and Store applications as its Chairman,” said Richard Mader, Executive Director of ARTS. “Through successful implementations, Cy Young knows what standards can provide direct benefit to retailers.” 

Young has been involved in the development and/or maintenance of most of the Open Systems based computer systems used by Burlington Coat Factory for almost 30 years. He oversaw the growth of systems during a period where Burlington grew from 27 to around 370 stores and to over $3.2 billion in sales. Most recently, he has spearheaded Burlington's point-of-sale software upgrades to support electronic check acceptance, online returns management and online layaway management, the latter two utilizing the ARTS XML standards for data transfer. 

In addition to serving on the ARTS Board since 2004, Young has served on the
Executive Board of the User Alliance for Open Systems and on the Advisory Board for the Retail Systems Alert Newsletter. He has been a regular speaker at retail and computer conferences on the subject of the adoption and use of Open Systems. Additionally, Young authored Burlington's innovative POS system which has led or tracked the industry in many areas of new technology. 

Burlington Coat Factory has a long history of innovation and use of open standards, from the implementation of wide area distributed processing in the retail store to being one of the first major retailers to use Unix in both store and corporate data centers. More recently, Burlington has again pushed the technology envelope with the use of Linux from POS to corporate "mainframe". Their successes in these have been made possible in part by the adoption of standards based technology.  

The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) is an international membership organization dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards. Since 1993, ARTS has been delivering application standards exclusively to the retail industry. ARTS has three standards: The Standard Relational Data Model, UnifiedPOS and ARTS XML. Membership is open to all members of the international technology community- retailers from all industry segments, application developers and hardware companies. www.nrf-arts.org

The National Retail Federation is the world's largest retail trade association, with membership that comprises all retail formats and channels of distribution including department, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet, independent stores, chain restaurants, drug stores and grocery stores as well as the industry's key trading partners of retail goods and services. NRF represents an industry with more than 1.6 million U.S. retail establishments, more than 24 million employees - about one in five American workers - and 2006 sales of $4.7 trillion. As the industry umbrella group, NRF also represents more than 100 state, national and international retail associations. www.nrf.com.

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