ARTS Announces Major Update to Point of Sale RFP

New York, NY, January 16, 2007 – The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) will announce a major update to the standard request for proposal (RFP) for selecting point of sales (POS) applications today at NRF’s Big Show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. As a benefit of membership, NRF and ARTS members may download the updated RFP free of charge.

To keep pace with the continued innovative POS features and services that retailers desire to attract and retain customers, ARTS has updated the POS RFP with more than 600 new features for retailers to consider in selecting POS. Since its release in January 2004, the POS RFP has been downloaded by hundreds of retailers and used effectively to select the “best” application for their business.

“This new version will be easier for retailers to use,” said Dennis Driscoll, Sr. Manager of Retail Technology at BearingPoint. “The Features and Functions section within the RFP have been better organized to identify the retailer departments that are best qualified to review and evaluate each section of the RFP. This will further streamline the RFP process and increase probability of selecting the best application.”

Technology requirements have been expanded within the RFP. Additionally, many new features specific to convenience, forecourt and foodservice keep pace with the expanded support provided by ARTS to cover the many retail segments included in the NRF umbrella.

Beyond adding additional features and functions, the RFP has been revised for ease of use. Each feature and function has been provided a unique number to permit automating the RFP within special RFP tools such as those provided by C-Core Consulting and Click and Mortar or generic tools such as Excel. This enables retailers to tailor the RFP to their business model easily while retaining the ability for vendors to respond quickly and accurately by matching to pre-prepare responses.

“The ARTS/NRF RFP offers retailers and vendors the opportunity to lower cost and reduce preparation time while benefiting from the combined knowledge and best practices of retailers and vendors worldwide,” said Ann McCool, ARTS board chair.

Every ARTS/NRF RFP has two sections: Master Agreement to guide negotiating and contracting and the Feature and Functions to identify the specific business processes and policies that must be supported by the selected application. ARTS has revised the Master agreement to strengthen the focus on contracting. Also, technology guidelines have been moved to the features and functions section.

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 IXRetail. Membership is open to all members of the international technology community- retailers from all industry segments, application developers and hardware companies. http://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 2005 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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