[September 27 2001] A technology standards project sponsored by the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) is developing XML DTDs and schemas to support electronic business document exchange within the convenience store industry. Several pilot projects have been started to test the NAXML specifications for lottery systems, fuel sales, food service transactions, and other retail activities. Version 3.1 of a guidelines document has been produced through the work of the NACS Point of Sale Back Office Task Force: NACS POS/Back Office Interface Guidelines. Common Data Elements and XML Data Interchange. The specification "addresses concerns expressed by the retail community related to the ability to pick back office solutions independently of POS solutions and yet have the two exchange data in an efficient electronic manner. Since early in the standards meetings sponsored by NACS, there has been retailer input and direction regarding their interest in BO/POS integration..." Sample XML DTDs and schemas are available from the web sites. The NACS standards development project is designed to "allow retailers, suppliers, and solution providers to seamlessly exchange financial settlement, ordering, invoicing, and accounting information. The working committees are formalizing models for a range of electronic transactions on general merchandise and supplies, motor fuels, lottery invoicing, and product activity, including general invoicing, purchase orders, credit card reconciliation, electronic fund transfer settlement, and payment remittance." NACS is an international trade association representing 2,300 retail and 1,700 supplier company members.
About the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS). NACS was founded August 14, 1961 and in 2001-09 was "an international trade association representing 2,300 retail and 1,700 supplier company members. NACS member companies do business in nearly 40 countries around the world, with the majority of members based in the United States. The U.S. convenience store industry, with approximately 119,750 stores across the country, posted $234 billion in total sales for 1999, with $134 billion in motor fuels sales." The NACS web site is at C-Store Central. Supporting the work of the NACS eB2B Subcommittee, a repository with XML DTDs and sample XML documents is publicly accessible via the NAXML web site.
NACS eB2B Subcommittee: "The eB2B Subcommittee has as its primary mission the identification of existing transaction sets and the definition of new sets that need to be defined for the convenience store industry. Through this process it will recommend a standard set of transaction sets for use by the industry." The NACS eB2B Subcommittee was formerly called the NACS EDI Standards Working Committee.
In July 2001, version 3.1 of the NAXML POS/Back Office Guidelines document was announced as ready for review. The following excerpts are drawn from Version 3.0, viz., "NACS POS/Back Office Interface Guidelines. Common Data Elements and XML Data Interchange." Version 3.0. National Association of Convenience Stores. Draft for Public Comment. January 1, 2001.
Overview: This document is the result of concerns expressed by the retail community related to the ability to pick back office solutions independently of POS solutions and yet have the two exchange data in an efficient electronic manner. Since early in the standards meetings sponsored by NACS, there has been retailer input and direction regarding their interest in BO/POS integration. Recognizing the wide array of choices available to retailers for both POS and BO systems, it was determined that a set of data elements which would represent the basic or minimal information required to be passed between the two systems should be established. Any specific implementation will undoubtedly require unique elements to be added to the specification. This version of the Guidelines is designed to offer Point-of-Sale and Back Office solution providers a starting point for discussion regarding the exchange of information between their systems. It provides a common framework, data dictionary, and data interchange mechanism for those common data elements that are likely to be exchanged between provider systems. These Guidelines recommend using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as a vendor-neutral data exchange medium. Specifically, XML documents are used to transfer data between the disparate Point-of-Sale and Back-Office systems; the content of these documents is defined and constrained by using document type definitions (or DTDs) as defined in XML 1.0.
This version of the Guidelines is designed to offer Point-of-Sale and Back Office solution providers a starting point for discussion regarding the exchange of information between their systems. It provides a common framework, data dictionary, and data interchange mechanism for those common data elements that are likely to be exchanged between provider systems.
Document construction: There are four DTDs that contain all of the requirements for producing XML documents that provide for the exchange of the Common Data Elements. See the repository with version 3.0 DTDs, sample documents, and documentation. These are:
- NAXML-PBIDictionary.dtd. This DTD contains declarations for all of the Common Data Elements except those used in all conforming documents. Note that XML attributes are used only in rare instances. Additionally, note that, by convention, all data element tags use the naming structure found in Common Data Elements. [cache]
- NAXML-PBIMaintenance.dtd. This DTD defines the structure of all possible XML documents conforming to the maintenance table structures outlined in Common Data Elements. [cache]
- NAXML-PBIMovement.dtd. This DTD defines the structure of all possible XML documents conforming to the movement table structures outlined in Common Data Elements. [cache]
- NAXML-POSJournal.dtd. This DTD defines the structure of the XML documents used for transaction and event reporting. [cache]
- See also Fuel Tank Stock Report DTD, [cache]
Background: The NACS POS/Back Office Standards Committee (Committee), at its meeting on May 9, 1997, appointed an adhoc Task Force to develop a list of data elements, organized in tables, for the exchange of information between disparate Back Office (BO) systems and Point-of-Sale (POS) systems... In January 1999, at the meeting of the NACS POS Back Office Committee the groundwork was laid for the Task Force to investigate XML as a data interchange mechanism. Beginning in October 1999, the Task Force began a review of XML and its possible use in developing industry guidelines for the interchange of the common data elements. The document, NACS Point-of-Sale Back Office Interface Guidelines -- XML Data Interchange (NAXML), represented the initial work product of the Task Force as it pertains to XML for Data Interchange. The use of XML as a transport mechanism is one possible methodology. Version 1.0 of that document was approved by the NACS Technology Committee as an official guideline and it was published on May 1, 2000.
NAXML Pilot Project activities. A number of draft DTDs and XML schemas have been produced in connection with the NAXML standards pilot activities. Some of these documents are available in the 'Pilot-Documents' directory of the NAXML Repository. For example:
- NAXML Transportation XSD [cache]; see also the version 1.1.1 XML DTD [cache]
- NAXML Data Dictionary DTD [cache]
- NAXML lottery documents DTD [cache]
- NAXML business document DTD [cache]
- NAXML fuel price/purchase DTD [cache]
- The repository also provides example XML documents; [cache/snapshot]
NAXML Repository. As of 2001-09, NAXML DTDs and sample XML documents could be located at 'www.naxml.org' in three NAXML.org Repository directories: (1) xml-edi; (2) Pilot-Documents; (3) Point of Sale Back Office.
References:
C-Store Central - NACS web site
NAXML Contact: John Hervey
[July 9, 2001] NACS Point of Sale Back Office Task Force Meeting Minutes. July 9, 2001. [cache]
[July 6, 2001] POS/Back Office Task Force XML Schema Presentation." NACS POS/ Backoffice Committee. Contributed by David Ezell (VeriFone, Inc.). 20 pages. [ cache]
[January 1, 2001] "NACS POS/Back Office Interface Guidelines. Common Data Elements and XML Data Interchange." Version 3.0. National Association of Convenience Stores. Draft for Public Comment. January 1, 2001. 213 pages. [cache]
"NACS Presentation on Lottery Technology Standards." 49 pages. The EDI/XML Opportunity. How to Take Costs Out of Handling Lottery Products. Prepared for NASPL 2000. "NACS and NASPL together are creating a standard..." [cache]
[August 05, 2002] "NACS Brings Convenience Stores to OASIS UBL Liaisons." - "NACS, an international trade association representing the convenience store and petroleum marketing industry, has become the latest industry group to appoint a representative to the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) Technical Committee. NACS joins liaisons from a broad group of industry standards organizations in the subcommittee that provides guidance to UBL, the initiative to define standard XML business forms for electronic commerce. NACS is an international trade association representing 2,300 retail and 1,700 supplier company members. NACS member companies do business in nearly 40 countries around the world, with the majority of members based in the United States. The U.S. convenience store industry, with over 124,500 stores across the country, posted $283 billion in total sales for 2001, with $171 billion in motor fuel sales... Other organizations with liaisons to UBL include: ACORD, representing the insurance industry; ARTS, representing retail sales; ASC X12 and the UN/EDIFACT Working Group, representing U.S. and international EDI standards; EIDX, representing the electronics industry; RosettaNet, the information technology consortium; and XBRL, the accounting industry standards organization. UBL liaisons provide input to UBL and coordinate the review of standard XML business schemas as they become publicly available. 'Input from industry data exchange organizations ensures that UBL reflects the needs of the marketplace,' said Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems, chair of the OASIS UBL Technical Committee and organizer of the working group that created XML. 'Our goal of defining a common XML library for basic business documents like purchase orders, invoices, and shipping notices crosses all industries. Contributing to the development of our library of UBL schemas allows industry groups to pool their resources in the design of common business documents and to focus their special expertise on the development of XML schemas for the documents that are specific to their own domain.' The OASIS UBL (Universal Business Language) Technical Committee defines a common XML library for basic business documents like purchase orders, invoices, and shipping notices. UBL provides a standard set of XML building blocks together with a framework that will enable trading partners to unambiguously identify and exchange basic e-commerce documents in specific business contexts..." See "Universal Business Language (UBL)."
[April 19, 2001] "Express Mart Accelerates Settlement with NAXML Services from fintech.net." - "Enhancing its current set of popular financial settlement solutions, fintech.net today announced the immediate availability of its seamless B2B financial settlement solutions utilizing the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) NAXML format. Along with many other popular data formats, fintech.net's scalable XML (eXtensible Markup Language) services and advanced financial settlement network now provides NAXML-based document processing. NAXML is the adopted XML guideline for the convenience store industry allowing back-end systems to easily and efficiently communicate commerce information to and from fintech.net... Working in conjunction with NACS and Professional Datasolutions, Inc. (PDI), fintech.net is piloting the NAXML settlement solution for Express Mart Food Stores, Inc. The pilot currently consists of Express Mart transmitting payment remittance data in NAXML to fintech.net directly from their PDI Resource Management Series (PDI/RMS) application. Fintech.net then processes the NAXML data for payment and then converts that data into each of the formats utilized by the Express Mart vendors. The next step will be converting Express Mart's other fintech.net data into the NAXML format for post back into PDI/RMS for a seamless payment/reconciliation solution..." [Source: HTML and PDF]
[April 16, 2001] "First XML Bill-of-Lading Transmission Implementing Industry-Specific Guidelines Sent." - "... Vulcan Oil Company became the first fuel distributor to receive an extensible Markup Language (XML) electronic bill-of-lading based on guidelines issued through the National Association of Convenience Stores' (NACS) Technology Standards Project. The transmission, part of an industry-wide pilot project, was sent to Vulcan Oil from a CITGO terminal in Birmingham, Ala., using Full Serv Software's Jobber Connections software, coupled with Diamond Control Systems, Inc.'s iLoad automation system that allows Internet-enabled data management. By automating the bill-of-lading process, fuel distributors such as Vulcan Oil can immediately issue invoices to delivered accounts, allowing for their near-instantaneous transmission. Traditionally, bills-of-lading are hand keyed, can take two to three days to process, and are susceptible to operator input errors... In XML bill-of-lading transmissions, electronic bill-of-lading documents are sent from the terminal, immediately following fuel loading, to the distributor over the Internet. The documents are in an XML format designed by NACS in conjunction with the participants...A total of three oil companies (CITGO, Conoco, and ExxonMobil), two terminal automation suppliers (Diamond Control Systems and TopTech), and four solution providers (Full Serv Software, PDI, Pinnacle, and PetroCast), on behalf of six distributors, are participating in this XML bill-of-lading pilot project."
[April 10, 2001] NAXML Lottery Documents Implementation Guide." 4 pages. "The NAXML-LotDoc.DTD is an XML schema for the validation of three types of XML instance documents. (1) LotteryInvoice.xml - An XML instance document that is created by a state or provincial lottery authority and sent to a retailer. This document contains information for the retailer regarding the amount of money that will be drafted from the retailer's bank account to settle lottery online and scratch transactions. (2) LotteryActivity.xml - An XML instance document that is created by a state or provincial lottery authority and sent to a retailer. This document contains information about lottery activity for the retailer, such as, scratch books sent, received, activated, settled, etc. (3) Lottery.xml - An XML instance document that is created by a state or provincial lottery authority and sent to a retailer. This document contains the information contained in both LotteryInvoice.xml and LotteryActivity.xml... NAXML-DataDictionary.dtd: All NAXML DTDs use draw element and attribute declarations from a common data dictionary. This enables the amount and complexity of elements to be kept to a minimum yet still preserve uniqueness where necessary. In order to validate a lottery XML instance document NAXML-LotDoc.dtd and NAXML-DataDictionary.dtd must be in the same directory or the path of the NAXML-DataDictionary.dtd must be spelled out in NAXML-LotDoc.dtd. NAXML-LotDoc.dtd contains the complex elements, i.e. those whose content model contains simple elements..." [cache]
[December 21, 2000] "Announcing a Major Breakthrough in Electronic Credit Card Processing Reconciliation. Motor Fuel Suppliers Join Retailers, Others in Successful XML Transmissions Announcements a Major Advance in Groundbreaking Technology Effort." - "CITGO Petroleum Corporation is the latest company to announce that it has successfully transmitted daily production feeds of credit card processing reconciliation data using Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) developed in conjunction with the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS). CITGO announced in late November that it had begun sending out a daily production feed of credit card processing reconciliation in an XML format developed jointly by NACS, CITGO, and Conoco, Inc., to Evans Oil, a CITGO distributor located in Louisiana. 'Evans Oil's accounting system provider, AIMS, Inc., has been very instrumental in making this happen as quickly as it did,' Hervey said. Conoco plans to begin sending data to distributors participating in NACS' XML pilot program by year's end. XML is a set of codes that describes text within a document to convey information electronically. Retailers will be able to use the technology to conduct electronic transactions on general merchandise and supplies, motor fuels, and lottery invoicing and product activity. In addition to CITGO and Conoco, a number of other companies are participating in XML tests, including nearly 20 convenience store retailers, six wholesalers, eight solution providers, and two financial settlement companies. Ten lottery states are also working to implement the guidelines. With an increasing volume of transactions in convenience stores now taking place with credit cards -- $65 billion dollars (28 percent of total sales) in transactions in 1999 -- XML is expected to lead to significant savings for the industry as electronic business document exchanges are simplified... The National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) is an international trade association representing over 2,300 retail and 1,700 supplier members. The U.S. convenience store industry, with 119,400 stores across the country, posted $234 billion in total sales for 1999, with $134 billion in motor fuels sales." Also from CStoreCentral
[December 13, 2000] "NAXML Pilot Project -- Getting Started." "The following guidelines are offered to help pilot participants get started on a NAXML Pilot Project using XML for the electronic exchange of business documents. NACS has committed to assist pilot participants with the content and structure of the business documents. The development of the choreography methodology (how documents will be transferred between trading partners) and the programming routines to accept, process and/or view the data is the responsibility of the trading partners and solution provider..." [cache]
[October 18, 2000] "PDI Uses NAXML Standard to Simplify Data Transfers." Professional Datasolutions, Inc. (PDI) and C.H.R. Corporation (Rutter's Farm Stores) have completed an industry-leading pilot program that simplifies the transfer of invoices across the Internet. The new technology uses the convenience store industry's NAXML standard to facilitate data transfers between retailers and vendors. Scott Hartman, vice president of Rutter's and chairman of the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) Technology Committee said he is pleased with the results of the test and is anxious to put the new technology into use. 'I'm delighted to see the first use of many years of personal effort come to pass,' said Hartman. 'The stage is set to finally see electronic documents flow easily between the vendors that serve this industry and our retail automation package. We're ready to put the process into production this week.' Hartman said his company is one of the first to use the new NAXML template, which applies extensible markup language (XML) -- a set of codes that describes text within a document -- to convey information electronically. In the test, Rutters used PDI's Resource Management Series (PDI/RMS) to receive an invoice transferred across the Internet from a dairy vendor.
[August 7, 2000] "New XML Process to Improve Data Transfers. An Information Resource from the NACS Technology Committee." - "A means to significantly improve the process to reconcile electronic retailer lottery, purchase orders, and invoices for credit card transactions is taking a step closer to implementation. At a summit meeting June 7 [2000] in Dallas on eXensible Mark-Up Language (XML)/electronic data interchange (EDI), NACS announced that pilot tests involving retailers, their trading partners, and solution providers are getting under way this summer. The effort will test the feasibility and cost reduction associated with the technology. Areas that will be examined include online and instant lottery settlement, pricebook maintenance and merchandise invoicing, and fuel bill-of-lading, invoicing, and credit card reconciliation. Since the new EDI does not require companies to have an information technology expert on staff to handle the work, the cost of this non-traditional EDI will be greatly reduced, especially for small- and medium-sized companies that have not yet been able to consider using EDI. Moreover, the technology is vendor neutral, human and machine readable, and can handle batch and real-time modes of operation. "We are excited about the opportunities that XML brings. It is an open and non-proprietary language that our channel of trade can use to address the problem of loose system-to-system integration and data exchange. It lowers some of the barriers that traditional EDI has, and will allow us to do business electronically with more of our trading partners," said Loring Perez, chief financial officer for Spectrum Stores, Inc. Perez is NACS' Technology Standards Steering Committee chairman and a member of NACS' Technology Committee. More than 80 industry professionals attended the XML/EDI Summit. During the meeting, several companies announced their participation in the pilot tests... The first level of the pilot tests will involve a straight printing out of the information; the second level will entail viewing the data through the Web browser; and the third level consists of direct integration of the data into the retailer's back-office system. It will be up to the pilot participants to select how they intend to implement the new XML/EDI. The tests will conclude by October. Following the tests, NACS intends to review and analyze the data and report on success stories at NACS' Annual Convention and Exposition this October [2000] in New Orleans."
[August 1, 2000] NACS Electronic Commerce Guidelines. XML Business-to-Business Document Exchange." NAXML. 58 pages. [cache]
[April 1, 2000] NACS POS/Back Office Interface Guidelines - XML Data Interchange (NAXML). Version 1.0. [Approved Document] April 1, 2000. 57 pages. Prepared by John Hervey for the NACS POS/Back Office Standards Committee. [cache]
[April 1, 2000] NACS POS/Back Office Interface Guidelines. Common Data Elements. Document Version 2.1. 136 pages. April 1, 2000. [cache]
[March 24, 2000] National Association of Convenience Stores. EDI Committee. XML Task Force Meeting. March 23-24, 2000. "... "John [H] reviewed the NACS XML initiatives. They include Convenience; (as described above for general merchandise/wholesale distribution); Lottery (using invoice and product activity transaction sets); and Motor Fuels (for credit card remittance information). Pilot Scope: The committee then discussed the Convenience XML pilot scope. It was decided that the NACS effort will focus on the content of the document from the wholesaler to the retailer's back office, facilitated by the software providers. Security, transport and acknowledgment will be the responsibility of the implementers, although the Task Force will address these issues after the pilot program is completed..."
