Subject Area Concepts Calendars identify, define and describe standardized templates to organize retailer time tracking into a hierarchy of named time intervals. All calendars organize time into named, hierarchical periods. For most retailers the time periods include years, seasons, quarters, months (often called periods), weeks and days. The ARTS data model structure for calendar allows retailers to insert new levels into the model as long as each level represents a contiguous block of business days and fits into the start and end business day of its parent calendar level. This feature enables retailers to create and use fiscal calendars, merchandising calendars, payroll calendars, etc. independently for different reporting and analytical purposes. The business day serves as the lowest common denominator and ensures that sales, receiving, inventory, time clock and other transactions may be consistently represented while enabling them to be aggregated into different higher level calendar levels. In ARTS all transactional entities are tied to a business day which how this consistency across different calendars is achieved. Calendar Period Versus Reporting Period The Calendar View subject area contains two kinds of "period" entities. The first is CalendarPeriod. The second is ReportingPeriod. CalendarPeriod is a regularly recurring period of time defined for a Calendar (e.g. a fiscal calendar) at a designated CalendarLevel (e.g. quarter, month, etc.). They key point here is that calendar periods occur on a recurring basis and are organized into a standardized hierarchy. ReportingPeriod is any time period bounded by a starting CalendarPeriod and an ending CalendarPeriod. A ReportingPeriod is a named block of one or more CalendarPeriod instances defined by the retailer. For example a reporting period called "Easter Promotion" may consist of a block of the CalendarPeriod entity instances for March and April. Another example might me "Valentines Day Promotion" which consists of a block of contiguous CalendarPeriods representing business days from 2014-01-15 through 2014-02-14. ReportingPeriods are made up of CalendarPeriods and allow retailers to create a wide variety of time intervals to measure and analyze their business. New Entities in Version 7.0 Two entities, BusinessUnitGroupScheduleType and BusinessUnitGroupSchedule have been added (see the pink block in the ERD below) to support store operating hours, warehouse operating hours and other scheduled times of business. The schedules use TimeGroup to define business hours by week day. Using TimeGroup in combination with TimeGroupPeriod and TimePeriod, retailers can define very granular open and closing schedules. The linkage to BusinessUnitGroup enables retailers to define schedules across business unit groups or down to a single business unit. The other new entity types are discussed in their "home" subject areas. They are presented here to provide a complete context for Calendar View. |