Logical 01010 - Item Description - Subtype View

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Logical 01010 - Item Description – Subtype View presents a subtype view of items.  It describes the wide variety of merchandise carried by different retailers.  Item includes all merchandise that is sold by the enterprise as well as that merchandise that is consumed by the enterprise in its day-to-day operations (supplies).  The ARTS Operational Data Model makes no differentiation between these two categories because retailers tend to apply similar controls.  Non-Merchandise supplies are ordered, received and counted the same as any other StockItem.  Any differentiation between supplies and StockItem is accomplished through attribution of the stock ledger.

A major assumption throughout the model is that ItemID represents the lowest possible level of data capture in terms of both Item Description data and Sales.  For example, if the data for an apparel Item is held at the option level, i.e. style, color and size, then sales would be captured at this same level.  However, this does  not presuppose that each retailer has to capture and maintain all Items at this level. A retailer may choose to maintain Item data at the style option but capture sales at a detailed style-color-style level.  In this instance, item sales monitoring and control is performed at an aggregate style level.  So, in this in this case, retail pricing, promotion and ticketing operations are performed at a style level.  Item identity, sale and return counts, etc. are performed at the style-color-size level.

The model identifies five Item subtypes:

StockItem represents the tangible merchandise stocked by the enterprise;

ServiceItem represents intangible services (for example: Equipment or Video Rentals or Equipment Servicing) for which a fee is paid;

AggregateItem represents sets of Items that are sold collectively;

PreparedItem represents an Item that is manufactured as part of the sale process. It is never tracked in the enterprise stock ledger account, although the bulk raw items that are consumed in the manufacturing process are; and

GroupSelectItem represents a set of Items, only one of which will be chosen by the customer at the point-of-sale.  For example, Item "12oz Soda" is the set of items "12oz Coke", "12oz Pepsi" and "12oz Sprite". When the cashier sells the "12oz Soda" the customer will nominate the specific type of soda  they wish to purchase.

Logical 01010 - Item Description - Subtype View  serves as a classification scheme for "things" that a retail enterprise wants to keep track of at a unit level.  It is important to note that the subtypes of Item inherit the attributes of its parent super-type.  For example, all Items will be identified by a unique key and have an item type code attribute  The item type code attribute serves as the discriminator to classify items into different types. Items will be referenced by one or more point of sale identities allowing them to be properly identified when recording sales transactions.

StockItems, or the things that a retailer sells are further divided into types as follows:

SerializedItem - A tangible, identifiable instance of an item this is tracked individually (for example, appliances, lawn equipment, watches, and other "big ticket" items that typically have warranties and related after-sale services associated with them);

ShelfItem - A tangible item packaged and sold off a shelf or rack (for example, health and beauty aids, grocery packaged goods, etc.);

ApparelItem - A tangible item that is worn, typically sold and tracked by style, color, size and width (for example, shoes, shirts, skirts, etc.);

BulkItem - A tangible item that is acquired in large quantities and sold in metered units like pounds, linear feet, square yards, etc. (for example, carpeting, deli meats, etc.);

FuelItem - A liquid petroleum item that is acquired in large quantities and measured and dispensed by devices on the forecourt. Item volume may change as it's temperature changes. (for example, petrol, gas, diesel, kerosene, etc.); and

DisplayUnitItem - A tangible item that is acquired and maintained by the store to present to shoppers in a display.

Note that the way in which StockItem subtypes are represented in Figure 27  is through an optional identifying relationship for the sub-type entity in lieu of the sub-type icon.  This subtle distinction is made in order to allow a StockItem to be more than one sub-type.  For example:

A blouse may be both an ApparelItem and a ShelfItem.  It has attributes about Size, Color and Style, as well as having attributes about it's dimensions which are used in store planning systems.; or

A refrigerator shares properties of both a SerializedItem and an ApparelItem. Each refrigerator is individually identified by it's serial number, but it may also have attributes about Color and Style (if not Size as well).

ServiceItem refers to those services necessary to install and, in some instances, maintain the StockItem. RentalService includes, for example something like  video rental which identifies a movie (StockItem) and a specific copy of that movie that is actually rented to a customer.

MiscellaneousFee is included in the Item hierarchy because it is a taxable item in some jurisdictions.  Also, the price for a miscellaneous fee my vary from one transaction to another based on retailer-specific business rules.  Because miscellaneous fees share the taxability and pricing characteristics of merchandise, it is modeled as a sub-type of ServiceItem.  This treatment allows miscellaneous fees to be assigned to a TaxableGorup and to have PriceDerivationRules applied to it.  Car wash services offered by convenience stores are often treated as miscellaneous fees.  They may have sales tax applied to them.  Also, they are offered as part of customer rewards program.  In these examples the car wash miscellaneous fee has tax applied to it and, in order to represent it as a uniform price (using whole dollars or other monetary units) requires a retail price modification for each transaction.

AggregateItem is an explicit sub-type of Item and uses ItemCollection, which acts as a recursive many-to-many relationship back to Item. ItemCollectionSubstitution allows a particular member of an ItemCollection to be substituted by one or more different Items

The StockItem entity type contains three cost attributes.  There are three different attributes associated with the cost price:

Base cost, which is the price excluding any allowances or promotions;

Net cost, which is the price including all the allowances and promotions received from the supplier; and

Landed cost, which is the net price plus the costs incurred by the retailer bringing it to market, such as freight charges. Retailers will usually take the landed cost as the cost of purchase to derive the markon.

The ApparelItem is intended to be used for any items that have descriptive attributes size, color and style.  In the operational data model, the size, color and style product properties are extended to cover additional kinds of items like appliances, furniture, etc. by associating the dependent item descriptive entity types Color, Style and Size with StockItem.

The two entities, Size and Color, contain attributes that allow the retailer the flexibility to adopt either the National Retail Federation (NRF) or an in-house, proprietary color and size set of standards for apparel and accessories.  The advantages of adopting the NRF standards are:

Simplification due to using a finite profiles of colors and sizes; and

The ability to identify merchandise accurately for data interchange between vendors and retailers, specifically for the purposes of ordering and sharing sales information.

The entities SizeFamily and SizeConversion allow for storing US, UK and European families of size codes, as well as the mapping between them.

The entities Style, DesignDetail and StyleDesignDetail allow the retailer to group styles based upon the design details of a particular item or set of items (for example, classification grouping based on large buttons, hidden zip, hooks and eyes).  The entities ColorPalette and StyleColorPalette allow the retailer to group styles based upon their available colors.

The entity Tare records the weight of the various containers and wrappers that are used to hold a BulkItem after it has been dispensed. The weight of the container is then removed from the weight of the item, when it is weighed to calculate the selling price.

The entities RelatedItemAssociation and RelatedItemAssociationType allow the retailer to define its own reasons for recording a relationship between two items.  For example, the retailer’s buyers may put together an ensemble of matching skirts, blouses and trousers consisting of items that are normally sold separately.

The ARTS Operational Data Model has also been extended to handle fresh item management (covered in a separate Fresh Item Management Section).   Fresh item introduces the ability to identify, track and report on retail unit items and item lots through all retailer processes that touch that product.  This "unit traceability" is a major enhancement to Release 6.1 of the ARTS Operational Data Model.