POS Back Office Committee

The mission of the POS/Back Office Committee is to develop standards that facilitate the efficient communication of information specific to the convenience and petroleum retailing environment particularly between the traditional functions of point of sale devices and back office workstations. The Committee Chair is David Ezell of VeriFone Inc. and the Vice Chair is Jeff Shein of Radiant.

The Committee is charged with maintaining the present version of the PCATS-NAXML standard by reviewing, maintaining, and approving change requests to it. In May 2006, PCATS developed a Certification Program for point-of-sale and back office providers that are conformant with the PCATS-NAXML standard based on use cases related to document producing applications. A number of sub-groups were established to facilitate committee work including documentation, schema editing, namespace redesign, and management of the PCATS change review process.

Over the years, the general requirement -- to make it easier to "interface" a conforming BOS to a conforming POS with minimal vendor-specific work required has remained changed. In general, the Committee would like to develop XML languages that enable a kind of "plug-and-play" and enhance the ability for vendors to "innovate" without breaking the spec.

The business benefits that this group brings to the industry include:

  1. reduced time to market for any given POS/BO combination;
  2. well-known performance bar for all implementations;
  3. improved choice for retailers with regard to either POS or BO systems, with the ability to mix and match; and
  4. increased variety of analysis tools available at the store and at the home office.

The Committee is soliciting the active participation of users, including retailers, and vendors of back office and POS systems. Retailers are especially needed to ensure that the standards are moving in the direction that will best satisfy retailers' needs both now and in the foreseeable future. Additional solution provider participation will ensure that the standards accurately reflect the capabilities of present and future systems. The industry will greatly benefit as the developed standards gain greater traction in the marketplace.

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