Subject Area Concepts Retail organizations are typically arranged as a hierarchy of functions with defined responsibilities and authority to make and execute business decisions. This subject area contains the entities and relationships retailers use to describe their organization. A BusinessUnitGroup entity represent aggregations of stores, warehouses, administrative offices, buying offices and any other retailer BusinessUnit entities into a named hierarchy. The AssociatedBusinessUnitGroup entity establishes the linkages needed to organize BusinessUnitGroup instances into parents and children and the BusinessUnitGroupLevel names and specifies the number of levels in a hierarchy. Retailers may set up multiple business unit hierarchies using the BusinessUnitGroupFunction entity. Each instance of a BusinessUnitGroupFunction entity establishes a distinct hierarchy root. Retailers using the ARTS model have used this feature to define geographic breakdowns of their business and brand breakdowns of their business. Each hierarchy supports a different way to aggregate and analyze business unit sales, costs and other data required to support retail decision making. |