Scoping business work items for UBL

[Tim McGrath <tim.mcgrath@documentengineeringservices.com>]

In working through a draft charter for the proposed new subcommittee I have been considering using what is known as the Supply Chain Operational Reference Model (SCOR) as the underlying structure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-chain_operations_reference).  Using such a framework helps us to be consistent and hopefully align with industry practices.  As UBL adoption is moving from mainly Governmental to Industry users this makes more sense.

Based on this I re-drew the UBL 2.1 Use Case diagram to fit the SCOR terminology.  I then plotted the scope of each business domain Subcommittee based on this revised set of Use Cases (see attached).  The Key to this is that the Green circles are SCOR concepts (pale Green are areas we don’t currently cover), the Blue are current UBL 2.1 use cases, the Yellow are the processes covered in UBL 2.1, the Pink is the old Buy-Ship-Pay (redundant).

I suspect this is a useful roadmap for now and into the future (areas not yet covered by our work).  But there are a few things to point out:

1. The Buy-Ship-Pay we used to follow is now more like Buy-Pay-Ship or Buy-Ship-Pay.  this seems sensible as often in eCommerce you Pay before you Ship.  In SCOR they consider Billing as part of Procurement in the sense you are procuring the money/credit to do business.

2. The proposed new Pre-Award subcommittee covers both Quotation and Tendering.

3. The current Procurement Subcommittee should be renamed Post-Award.  

4. CPFR does not fit in any current Subcommittee so we could consider this a general UBL process until such point we have other Planning activities.  

5. This identifies the areas of intersection between the Subcommittees. Such as Catalogue Provision (between Pre- and Post-Award) and Fulfilment and Status Reporting (between Post-Award and Transportation).

I would like to put this to the TC for discussion before we finalise the terms of reference for the proposed new subcommittee(s).

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Regards 

Tim McGrath
tim.mcgrath@documentengineeringservices.com

Fremantle, Western Australia 6160

AUSTRALIA

Phone: +61438352228

Skype: t.mcgrath