Use cases

Below you can find examples of Score being used in various enterprises. The first is a specific use case from the agricultural cooperative Land O' Lakes. The rest are more general contexts in which Score has been and can be used.

• Land O' Lakes
• OAGIS 10.7 with Score 2.0
• Food production
• Financial industry
• Benefits to SMEs

Land O' Lakes

Land O’Lakes (LOL) is a diversified agri-food manufacturing company with products ranging from consumer foods, animal feeds, and crop products. Because of its diversity of products, LOL runs several enterprise resource planning and manufacturing execution pieces of software. To increase business and manufacturing performances such as productivity and agility, these software need to be integrated. To reduce the total costs of owning these integrations and to insulate supply chain partners from internal complexity, LOL uses the Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) as the canonical data exchange standard to enable integrations across business areas in manufacturing, order management, and finance.

However, OAGIS comes with both benefits and challenges.  In one view, since OAGIS is a horizontal standard covering multiple industry and business processes requirements, over the last 20+ years it has collected an extremely large set of data elements assembled into components to draw upon and reuse.  The negative is that the scope of these data elements have caused the developers to feel that OAGIS is ‘bloated’ and its middleware tools buckled as a result of the extremely large schemas. 

Therefore, LOL uses Score to ‘profile’—i.e., select a subset of fields for the specific usage to, pairing it down to a smaller subset needed for the enterprise and /or the business process context it is used.  For example, it was evident that some data elements come from other industries, and are not applicable to their industry, such as specifying the specific certifications and skills/qualifications of an inspector of finished goods. Often the representation of a Party only requires a handful of fields—such as the name, identifiers such as account identifiers, basic location address information—and key contact information such as phone and email identifiers. LOL was able to quickly use Score to collaborate across enterprise architect and subject matter experts and reduce a party structure from roughly eight thousands (8000) data elements to a handful of only the necessary data elements. The compact and precise integration artifacts generated from Score including the reduced data exchange schema (while still conforming to the standard) and the associated API specification also allow developers to focus their implementation and save time. Overall, LOL sees three-fold improvement in productivity when using Score.

OAGIS 10.7 with Score 2.0

Score is currently being used to develop and maintain new releases of OAGIS, starting with OAGIS version 10.7. OAGIS is an XML interoperability standard that helps users exchange data, especially business documents. Read about the release of OAGIS 10.7 and Score 2.0 here.

Food production

The Score team is working with AgGateway, a global organization that works to improve digital connectivity in global agriculture and related industries, on a number of aspects of data exchange standards. For example, the AgGateway Product Catalog Working Group is using Score to improve product catalogs and supply chains so online stores have complete and up-to-date information. This addresses needs of crop and seed manufacturers. Their first phase—providing the minimum data set required to populate a retail-facing eCommerce catalog—has been completed. Specifically, AgGateway’s Standards & Guidelines Committee recently approved the OAGIS Catalog JSON Schema v1.0 profile using the NIST/OAGi Score Tool.  The catalog standard profile designed and generated in Score was successfully used in an enterprise systems integration workflow.

Financial industry

The Score team works with the Business Payments Coalition (BPC)-led e-Invoice Semantics Workgroup to help develop the semantic model for ensuring that North American markets—including small and medium enterprises (SMEs)—have electronic invoicing capabilities.  Score is being used to support mapping of the BPC-adopted UBL (Universal Business Language) data exchange standard onto the OAGIS standard.  We expect this to help the OAGIS Express Pack (see above) address the BPC e-Invoice requirements so that SMEs can immediately use the Express Pack.  In addition, Score allows OAGIS to be immediately usable in this upcoming future e-Invoice network as the data exchange standard that connects the supplier and customer to the network.  The BPC will be assessing the e-Invoice Exchange Framework Standards in 2021, and will consider using the Score platform in the Standards Oversight Assessment capability. This would be in addition to the ongoing work helping SMEs adopt e-Invoicing.

Benefits to small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

The OAGi SME Working Group is using Score in two ways:

1. Score is being used to efficiently define relatively small profiles in the OAGIS data exchange standard, which update in-sync with OAGIS, and generate easy-to-use schemas that implement technologies of choice.  The profiles would reflect the requirements gathered from SMEs over many years in an 80–20 principle (i.e., 80% of the users need only 20% of the product) approach.
2. Score was used to create the OAGIS Express Pack, a collection of data exchange standard schemas that helps small businesses with e-commerce. Score allows new data elements to be rapidly adapted and added to the Express Pack schemas from the larger OAGIS standard.  A large portion of OAGIS schemas have been profiled for the Express Pack and used to generate on-demand XML, JSON, or OAS Schemas for common exchanges in procure-to-pay integration scenarios (including Purchase Order and Shipment Notice).