Logical 01300 - Item Price Maintenance View

Subject Area Concepts

The Logical 01300 - Item Price Maintenance View subject area presents the entities related to keeping retail item current selling prices and static, descriptive data up to date.   At the highest level, DataMaintenanceEvent establishes a class of events related to modifying or adding to master data about items, price derivation rules, and item prices.  The DataMaintenanceEvent class-level entity identifies the Operator who keyed in the maintenance through a foreign key. Operator is tied to a Worker through the WorkerOperatorAssignment . Worker, through PartyRoleAssignment identifies the Party who, in most cases will be a Person.  These relationships ensure that the person making the changes is identified for audit and control purposes.

The maintenance includes updates to the qualitative aspects of an item including appearance, item packaging, item shipping and pack quantities, item weight, item volume, item identifiers and other relatively static data.  With that in mind, item maintenance, as modeled here, is skewed towards retail price change.  Retail price changes (both permanent and temporary markdowns) occur more frequently than item description changes.  Also, because they directly alter the retail valuation (and with it the cumulative markon and gross margin profitability of merchandise), retail price changes must be tracked closely throughout the enterprise to determine when, where and how they are applied at the point of sale.

The sub-types of ItemMaintenanceEvent record data changes for a particular Item at all retail stores and distribution centers in a particular BusinessUnitGroup.

The transition reward triggered changes to this view.  The changes include:

•Dropping the price derivation maintenance rule maintenance; and

•Adding three maintenance entities which include: RewardMaintenance, RewardEligibilityRuleMaintenance and RewardDerivationRuleMaintenance.

•Price changes and reward derivation rule changes are the most frequent types of maintenance performed on retailers’ item and price files.  This view reflects the assumption that most item and retail price maintenance is planned and centrally directed from the home office.  A business unit may initiate limited price changes to correct errors or deal with a local competitive situation on an exception basis.  Entities related to the creation and management of item and price maintenance (including links to advertising expenses, promotional calendars, etc.) are not fully  developed beyond the DataMaintenanceEvent of this release of the ARTS Operational Data Model.  Instead the view emphasizes the item description and price entities, relationships and attributes required to support business unit-level price lookup and derivation and inventory management.

The Item and Price Maintenance View explicitly models three major kinds of maintenance:

•Item Description Maintenance: Reflects the creation, update and deletion of items and item descriptive information.  This is targeted at keeping the enterprise's list and description of merchandise and services current;

•Item Price Maintenance: Reflects the permanent and temporary assignment of a new retail price to items sold by the enterprise.  A permanent price change for an item results in the assignment of a new retail price value for all units of the item in stock.  A temporary price change for an item results in the assignment of a new retail price only to units sold during the temporary price change effective period. In both permanent and temporary price changes, an item is assigned a new price independently of any sales transaction. Item price maintenance may be qualified at the individual item level (i.e. stock keeping unit level) or be globally qualified to include a range of individual items at a class or department level; and

•Reward Derivation Rule Maintenance: Reflects the creation, update and deletion of reward derivation rules (not the permanent or temporary price of items).  Price derivation rules are dependent on sales transactions and are applied based on conditions satisfied by specific RetailTransaction instances.  Reward derivation rules do not directly update the retail valuation of items.  Instant rewards may be applied on a transaction by transaction basis as a markdown in which case the difference between the retail price and derived price is accumulated in the StockLedgerAccount of the appropriate item.  Alternatively, reward derivations may be disposed of as expenses that show up in the enterprise's profit and loss statement below the gross margin figure.  Like Item Price Maintenance, Reward Derivation Rule Maintenance may be qualified at the individual item level (by SKU) or globally (i.e. at a class or department level).

The emphasis in this view is to keep the Item Maintenance View at a relatively broad level and not propose detailed data specifications.  This approach will enable retailers to implement this facet of the business unit operation in accordance with their specific marketing requirements.  During retailer review the Data Model Committee will be looking for guidance as to whether further development would be beneficial in this area.

The result from applying Item Price Maintenance is reflected in the ItemSellingPrices entity that is directly referenced from the Item entity.  When designing a procedure for deriving an item price within a retail transaction, the starting price is taken from the ItemSelllingPrices entity.