Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, has announced the release of the Retail Logical Data Model (RLDM) 4.0, which has significant new extensions to support subject areas including Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), retail pharmacy, catalogue, planograms, serialised item tracking and third-party syndicated data. In addition, several subject areas have been expanded, including customer/party, item, inventory (basis for internal supply-chain management), payment account, point of sale, sales, sales fulfilment and time period.

"RFID is the biggest paradigm change in retailing management since the advent of universal product codes, or UPC," said Jonathan Klaus, VP of solutions development for Teradata. He explained that a simple example is on-shelf availability. Studies have shown 25% to 33% of out-of-stock occurrences are caused by poor on-shelf management, irrespective of supply-chain problems. These small percentages translate to multimillion-dollar bottom-line impacts.

The new solution supports all segments of the retail industry, including supermarket, drug/pharmacy, department store, mass merchant, discount, wholesale club, convenience, specialty and e-retailing.

The value of retail RFID, which is of increasing importance to retailers, has been modeled into the RLDM 4.0 to show what types of data are collected and how it will be potentially used to track serialized items (i.e. each, case, pallet) throughout the supply and demand chains.

Financial management elements in the new model have been enhanced to assist in meeting reporting requirements established in the Sarbanes - Oxley Act.

"The benefits of the RLDM 4.0 include providing an integrated data framework for retail companies that serves as a single, consistent source for decision data that drives better, faster decisions and profitable growth. It builds business value by enabling retailers to leverage information within the enterprise in order to provide better insight over the competition," said Des Martin, VP of global industry consulting for retail at Teradata.

The Teradata RLDM 4.0 is a graphic representation of the information requirements for a data warehouse environment and specifies where individual data elements are stored and how they relate to one another to provide a model of business activity. It provides an industry-specific logical data model constructed in a flexible, scalable structure designed to grow with the business and assist users to answer critical business questions.

The RDLM 4.0 serves as a road-map for achieving cross-functional data integration in an organization. It also controls data redundancy and access to standards, aids the communication between technical and business constituencies and imposes a rigorous technique for a stable and reliable enterprise data warehouse environment.

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