CA Technologies announced that the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), the technology standards division of the National Retail Federation, is using CA ERwin(R) to develop a uniform data model for the retail industry. This standard model is intended to help member businesses reduce IT complexity and improve their profitability. ARTS develops best practices, technology standards and training programs to help retailers and their technology suppliers do business globally in a cost-effective manner.

Members include top retailers and technology vendors to the retail industry. To make fact-based business decisions that maximize profitability, retailers need integrated IT systems that capture and share meaningful and useful data. The ARTS Operational Data Model provides a standard architecture for retail systems that is built, updated and maintained using CA ERwin.

Featuring more than 800 entities, 4,900 attributes and thousands of relationships, the model provides consistent business terminology and technology standards to help retailers build and integrate IT systems. The operational data model is linked to the ARTS Data Warehouse Model, which is also managed using CA ERwin, and enables customers to collate and manage real-time and historical data to create meaningful reports for improved decision-making. In addition to creating and managing data models, ARTS uses CA ERwin to help explain and optimize business processes -- benefiting the business sponsors as well as the IT department.