Payment Means cardinality in Order Response

[stephen.green@systml.co.uk]

Greetings UBL TC

As pointed out to me by Luca Reginato in Italy, we have an
inconsistency between the document types in that in most
of them PaymentMeans has minimum occurance 0 and maximum
occurance unbounded, which is great as PaymentDueDate can
be automated even when there are multiple payment due dates
by using multiple PaymentMeans occurances. So far so good.
However it is quite a general requirement to use the
OrderResponse document as a key document (usually calling it
'order confirmation' or 'order acknowledgement') as with
what is called 'punch out' and similar common practises.
In such cases the OrderResponse is the primary document from
the seller (or seller's agent) and so it there is a strong
requirement to include here the payment information such
as a Payment Due Date or set of Payment Due Dates. The
inconsistency is that in UBL 2.0, although the need for such
payment requirement information is acknowledge by the
inclusion of PaymentMeans, it is only, in the OrderResponse
with the allowance of zero or one occurances (hence only a
single payment due date at most).

I do accept that fixing this would be quite a challenge as
it may involve a backwards compatibility issue. Maybe there
is a way to fix it by creating a new ASBIE and ABIE which
has multiple occurances and appending it to the Order Response.
Otherwise it would seem implementers making primary use of
the OrderResponse in this way have to 1. create their own
extension which reduces the opportunities for interoperability
or 2. use a document such as Invoice in situations where this
is otherwise deemed as unnecessary (and therefore more expense
is imposed which doesn't necessarily bring a proportional
return on investment perhaps) or 3. do without the automation
of the payment due dates and just use a note or description.
I think 3. is unsatisfactory as it should be a major benefit
of using UBL that payments can be fully automated as part of
use of implementing electronic procurement with UBL.

Best regards

-- 
Stephen Green

Partner
SystML, http://www.systml.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 117 9541606

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