The Association for Retail Technology Standards, a division of the National Retail Federation, has created a data warehouse design exclusively for business intelligence. Drawing on 15 years of experience in developing data standards exclusively for retail, the goal of the data warehouse is to make information easily accessible to support improved decision making, one of the top priorities for retail Chief Information Officers.
The new warehouse model includes definitions of many key performance indicators to guide retailers in capturing and storing the data required to allow decision makers to analyze these critical success criteria. Microsoft was one of the business intelligence providers that worked with leading Retailers in the development of this data warehouse.
The current release of the warehouse focuses on sales and inventory information with cross views of time, location, vendor, merchandise categories and item attributes. Future versions will expand the warehouse to include all important retail information.
The KPIs in the datawarehouse can easily be made available thoughout the retail organization using Office PerformancePoint Server. Microsoft Performance Management allows customers to monitor, analyze, and plan their business as well as drive alignment, accountability, and actionable insight across the entire organization. Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides all of the functionality that is needed for performance management including scorecards, dashboards, management reporting, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation. The application reaches all employees, across all business functions (finance, operations, marketing, sales, and human resources).
ProfitBase, a Microsoft Partner, also provides Data Warehousing solutions for Retail based on the ARTS specifications. ProfitBase 2007 for Retail enables retail information workers to create better plans and to track key performance indicators (KPI) so they can see their performance against their objectives and act on opportunities and problems.