ARTS Announces International XML Standard

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Kathy Grannis or Ellen Davis (202) 783-7971
grannisk@nrf.com or krugmans@nrf.com

Washington, DC, November 21, 2006 – It’s no industry secret that retailers, manufacturers and their suppliers can save billions of dollars annually by adopting standards for the automated exchange of product content such as pictures, videos, captions for use in shelf-edge and digital signs, catalogs, e-commerce websites, kiosks, etc.  The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), a division of the National Retail Federation, today announced the release of an XML schema to enable retailers and their suppliers to more efficiently create and manage images and text used to present products to consumers. AMR Research recently estimated the annual cost of these processes to be in excess of $5 billion USD. This standard will facilitate the efficient creation and exchange of both images and text used in presenting products to consumers. 
 

“This standard will help retailers by reducing costs of the acquisition and maintenance of product content. Manufacturers will see much improvement in their ability to guide the way their products are sold to consumers,” said Richard Mader, Executive Director of ARTS.  “The ultimate winner is the consumer, who will see the impact of reduced costs and better information about the products in which they are interested.”   

The new standard replaces the previously-released Digital Asset Management (DAM) schema and was developed by a diverse ARTS committee which included retailers such as Blockbuster, Circuit City, El Cortes Inglés, RadioShack, Reebok, and Target, and suppliers such as AccessVia, Clicks & Mortar, Datavantage, Gladson Interactive, IBM, Interwoven, and Mars Interactive. 

The PCM v2 release will allow trading partners to standardize how they create and exchange images and text used in presenting products to consumers, and could ultimately lead to an entirely new category of applications and processes that reduce costs while increasing the quality and accuracy of product information. While much of the development has focused on the supply chain requirements for item information, this is the first global effort intended to allow synchronization of product content beyond those basic transactional elements.  “E-commerce kicked off the product content crisis with the first large-scale requirement for images of all retail products,” noted Dean Sleeper, CEO of AccessVia and Chair of the PCM work team. “The rise of multi-channel retailing and the emergence of new consumer messaging strategies are rapidly amplifying the challenges and costs.” 

“The dramatic growth of internet shopping has not been lost on ARTS,” said Ann McCool Chair of ARTS Board. “PCM can be used with the recently-released ARTS Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) schema that communicates product data standardizing images and data.  And the Master Data Management RFP is a great guide for product information management and global data sync.” 

The standard is specified in XML, the data language of the internet.  Anyone involved in the retail business that needs to work with comprehensive product content will benefit from this specification. PCM v2 offers seamless integration with other ARTS standards such as Item, Price and the recently released Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE), as well as other global standards such as GS1. 

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. 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 $4.4 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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