The Board of Directors for the Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Standards Association (VICS) recently approved the VICS CPFR XML Messaging Model as a specification which "establishes voluntary guidelines for XML message exchange among systems that implement the VICS Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) principles. The CPFR XML Messaging specification has been developed in cooperation with retailers, manufacturers, distributors, and other software and professional services providers. The guidelines "define a process to exchange, compare and alert trading partners to changes in key supply chain data to reduce inventory and improve customer service. CPFR is a process that touches many functional areas of the supply chain, including product activity, supply chain performance, forecasts, promotions, and product profile information. Various other efforts are responsible for standardizing XML messages in these areas, and the VICS CPFR XML specification has been integrated with the broader set of EAN/UCC XML specifications endorsed by the Global Commerce Initiative (GCI) to ensure full coverage of CPFR process without creating overlapping or redundant message formats. The existing core EAN/UCC messages for item synchronization, party (trading partner) synchronization, purchase order, invoice, despatch (shipment notice) and other information have been augmented with the CPFR product activity, forecast and other transactions. The CPFR XML Messaging model uses class diagrams from the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to represent CPFR entities as a set of object classes. The CPFR XML Messaging model includes an XML Schema [XSD] mapping that provides a concrete syntax for messages, to encourage interoperability."

"CPFR XML is implemented as an extension of the EAN-UCC XML Standard. The EAN-UCC XML Standard schemas are divided into a set of core types, basic transactions such as order, invoice, and despatch advice, and specific industry process profiles that elaborate the basic transaction types with industry-specific extensions. CPFR is a specific business process. However, some of the CPFR document types (forecast, product activity, event) have broader applicability, and are not currently represented in the EAN-UCC core schema. To create a CPFR schema based upon the set of EAN-UCC schemas, the forecast, product activity and other generic document types will be added to the EAN-UCC core types, and a new CPFR schema, with its own namespace, will be created that contains CPFR-process-specific types, and imports EAN-UCC core types. CPFR-process-specific types include the exception, exception criteria, and batch documents, which themselves will be placed in separate files."