Data Model Modification History

The ARTS Operational Data Model has been evolving since its original release in 1996.  Here is a short history:

Version 1.0

•Original Release August 1997:

❖This release established the store operations portion of the model;

Version 2.0

•August 1999:

❖Added Customer Relationship Management to the model.

❖Included another document called INTEGRATED BUSINESS VIEW, DATA MODEL, VERSION 2.0.  Much of the content of that document overlapped with this document.  The contents of the integrated business view document has now been incorporated into this document;

Version 3.0

•March 2001

❖Added the Forecourt subject area

❖Price derivations and taxation structures of the model underwent significant overhaul;

Version 4.0

•March 2003

❖Introduced the entity StoreGroup (subsequently replaced with BusinessUnitGroup) which allows the model to expand from its traditionally store-centric view to an enterprise-centric view;

Version 5.0 and 5.1 Maintenance

•March 2005

•Expanded the model into enterprise business functions, as well as:

❖The separation of Item Inventory (which records what stock is kept where) from the Stock Ledger Account (which records how much stock the retail enterprise owns);

❖Inclusion of entities required to support Customer Order management;

❖An update of POSLog structures to match ARTS XML Schema POSLog v2.1; and

❖Inclusion of Worker management structures to match ARTS XML Schema Worker v1.0.

•2007 Maintenance Release Version 5.1

❖Interim maintenance release, incorporated a number of technical corrections and improvements to the 5.0 version.

Version 6.0

•March 2009

❖Transaction Taxes: Enhanced support for transaction taxes, addressing a wider variety of retail transaction taxes, levies, and fees. These enhancements provide greater support for the flexible configuration of taxes, tax rules, tax authorities and jurisdictions;

❖Tax Registrations and Certificates: Enhanced support for the recording of tax registrations and certificates;

❖Person data: Enhanced support for internationalization and localization of personal data, plus added ability to track a variety of birth date information;

❖Commissions: Enhanced support for Commission Plans;

❖Price Modifications: Ability to increase and decrease the price of an item via a promotion or price adjustment;

❖Merchandise Group / Buyers: Ability to support multiple buyer responsibilities for merchandise groups;

❖Till Assignments: Separated till accountabilities from workstation assignments;

❖Shipment tracking: Greater support for estimated and actual shipping information;

❖Customer Verification: Expanded support for newer techniques of customer verification during tender;

❖Device Events: Added the ability to capture device events such as printer out of paper, offline, etc.;

❖Manual Discounts and Price Modifications: Added the ability to support manual price modifications at the retail transaction line level;

❖Geo-coordinates: Expanded ability to support multiple geo-coordinate systems and map coordinates to physical addresses (Geo-coding);

❖Loyalty Programs: Enhanced support for newer loyalty reward card types and expanded loyalty award tracking;

❖International Currency: Extended money-related attributes to better support international currency requirements; and

❖Gift Certificates: Enhanced support for new media types of gift certificates, plus extended tracking of balance amounts.

Version 6.1

•January 2011

❖Introduces support for Fresh Item Management and related business functions requiring item retail selling unit traceability;

❖Improves support for sales restriction validation processing by moving question and answer to retail transaction level while retaining the invocation of sales restrictions at the item level;

❖Extended Forecourt History View by adding a PumpTest entity type and attributes to record retailer and regulatory testing and calibration of fluid metering subsystems; and

❖Implemented a number of technical corrections and upgrades to version 6.0.

Version 7.0

•March 2014

❖Adds a comprehensive set of entities to describe customer demographic, psychographic, geographic and special interests and activities - this applies to individual consumers as well as to organization consumers;

❖Adds entity types to classify and analyze customer behavior which applies to known, identifiable customers as well as anonymous customers;

❖Adds a subject area and entities to support consumer-customer lifetime tracking and analysis using a state-transition representation of the consumers journey.  This set of entities facilitates creating and capturing  retailer defined consumer conversion states and events.  In this release it explicitly links conversion events to channels, business units, locations and retail transactions;  

❖Adds new customer contact entities for web sites and social media;

❖Extends the treatment of channel beyond a single attribute to encompass touch points, communication type media type and links it to transactions, consumer-conversion events and customer orders;

❖Adds explicit support for Households and allows retailers the option to track consumer-customer activity by household as well as by individual;

❖Adds new weather entities and attributes to help in classifying consumers, geographic areas and item categories.  Also weather is tied explicitly to retail transactions to extend ARTS customer analytic support;

❖Revises the way Party is sub-typed.  Customers, suppliers, tax authorities and all of the different kinds of individuals and organizations retailers interact with are now treated as subtypes of PartyRoleAssignment which is an important correction to the earlier data model versions;

❖Adds a sample entity to support wallet share analysis of customer purchases;

❖Establishes the customer context for further extension of the ARTS Operational Data Model into promotion management, customer loyalty program, customer interaction, social networking and other aspects of consumer-retailer interaction;

❖Expansion of data model work products to include fully generated data definition language (DDL) for SQL Server 2012 as well as a sample generated SQL Server 2012 database.  The DDL includes views and tables used to extract, transform and load the ARTS Data Warehouse Model Version 3.0.  It also includes sample reference data for item categories and calendar.

❖Applies a number of corrective modifications to the ARTS Version 6.1 Operational Data Model including a substantial rework of the till settlement entities, attributes and definitions to improve consistency;

Version 7.1

•February 2015

❖ Adds transaction support for Change For Charity along with entities to represent charities and donation processors;

❖Expands Version 7 treatment of Location by adding entities to capture location coordinates and a more flexible way to represent location hierarchies.  A direct join entity now establishes a link between merchandise classifications and locations;

❖Adds attributes to capture tendered coupons that could not be applied to purchases and may be returned to customers.  This enhancement brings the data model into alignment with the ARTS Pricing Service specification;

❖Reviews the different identity domains in use across the entities in the ARTS data model and revises them to standardize on using a non-significant numeric long integer domain type in lieu of the UUID 32 character type; and

❖Makes a number of minor corrective changes related to spelling, diagram color coding and definitions.

Version 7.2

•February 2016

❖Clarified GiftCertificateClass.GiftCertificateTypeCode definition. (1.1);

❖Added missing sequence number in CustomerOrderControlTransactionLineItem entity type  (1.2);

❖Extended length of eMail Address attributes to 253 bytes (1.3);

❖Replaced Unit of Measure English-Metric Flag in UnitOfMeasure entity with a new entity and foreign key reference (MeasurementSystem.MeasurementSystemID) (1.5);

❖Added a role name to the FK relationship from the FulfillmentAcknowledgementLineItem entity to the SaleReturnLineItem to clarify the idea that the sale return (i.e. merchandise) item in a retail transaction is derived from the fulfillment of a customer order line item;

❖Added FK from ItemCountryOrigin to ISO3166-1Country.  Modified name of CountryOriginType to CountryOriginRoleType .  This is to clarify the purpose of CountryOriginType which explains the nature of the country's designation as a place where an item came from.  For example a food item may be grown in Thailand and canned in China and subsequently imported to the US.  In this scenario, Thailand and China both represent  different sources of the food item.  This change helps to understand the nature of the sourcing role played by a country  (1.10);

❖Added two new entities. Logo which maintains the logo URI reference and name information and DigitalAssetFormatType that qualifies the binary format used as a source to render the logo.  The Logo entity is referenced in Transaction as a foreign key (1.11);

❖Added a definition for ODM72 Site.RetailSiteTypeCode;

❖Added a foreign key from CustomerSurvey to RetailTransaction.  This optional relationships allows retailers the option of treating surveys separately OR as part of a retail transaction.  Survey requirement (1.17);

❖Add an optional FK from ItemSalesSummary to PromotionalOfferHistory.  Through joins this will link sales facts to the promotional initiative and offer descriptive data. (1.19)

❖Add minimum advertised retail unit price to ItemSellingPrices entity (1.27);

❖Beginning with ODM V7.2 a unique SessionID attribute will replace the ID_TRN_SSN_SRT attribute in the primary key of the Session entity.  This separates session ID from transaction ID and will solve the problem of a circular reference that may be encountered when generating a physical database (1.29);

❖Reversed relationship between DonationLineItem and Contribution to make ODM handling of charitable contributions consistent with CHANGE FOR CHARITY XML 1.0.  In the revised model, a DonationLineItem is captured as part of a retail transaction and Contribution represents its assignment to a specific charity (and donation processor);

❖Added CustomerReturnAuthorizationNumber owned attribute to ReturnLineItem entity;

❖Added a CreditMemoFlag owned attribute to CustomerAccountInvoice to indicate that the document is a negative invoice (aka credit memo);

❖Modified the Logical 07200 - Customer Purchase Transaction History View by including the CustomerAccountInvoice entity.  Modified the CustomerAccountInvoice entity by adding a CreditMemoFlag which provides a flag to distinguish between charge sales and credit refund activity.  Also added a RefundFlag to the PaymentOnAccountLineItem that is used to associate customer account activity with specific retail transactions and

❖Minor correction of spelling errors and diagram formatting.

Version 7.3

•January 2017

❖Extended ARTS support for wider range of customer membership types beyond loyalty programs by adding new entities and reorganizing existing entities to distinguish subscription memberships from loyalty memberships (see the Customer Membership Programs and Rewards topic for details);

❖Revised and extended ARTS Customer Accounts to more fully support layaway, installment payment, revolving charge, trade, customer subscription membership, and customer loyalty membership accounts.  Earlier versions of the ODM had partial support for these different kinds of customer accounts.  Version 7.3 fills in missing customer account entities, attributes and relationships and adds new ones tied to customer membership programs and rewards.  See the Logical 07010.01 - Party to Customer Account Mapping topic for details);

❖Extended ARTS handling of customer rewards in a way that integrates promotions and customer membership based benefits.  This builds on ARTS ODM V7.2 customer loyalty program and approach to representing promotions.  See Customer Membership Programs and Rewards plus its sub-topics for a complete explanation of the data model.  The explanation includes detailed use cases that uses populated tables to illustrate how different kinds of promotions and customer rewards look in the data model.  See Customer Rewards Use Case Models for details;

❖Added Logical 02302 - Retail Transaction - Documents subject area which explicitly represents point of sale documents and distinguishes them from point of sale transactions, line items and line item modifiers.  This is important because it allows retailers to capture point in time documents (like sales receipts, bounce back coupons, vouchers, etc.) in the originating retail transaction and allows them to be reprinted or viewed later;

❖Added Logical 07602 - Customer Order - Delivery subject area which extends customer order shipping information by adding new reference entity types to more completely define shipment and carrier options.  It also adds a CustomerOrderShipmentContainer entity type to improve model support for multi-package shipments;

❖In addition to these major changes ODM V7.3 includes a number of extended entity and attribute definitions (see Detailed ARTS 7.2 To 7.3 Changes for a detailed comparative list of entity, attribute and relationship definitions); and

❖The ARTS ODM V7.3 entity diagrams include colored boxes used to group closely related entity types together to improve model presentation and to help readers more quickly identity subject area patterns.