The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is implementing technology from Fundtech-subsidiary Accountis to provide bank-branded electronic invoicing services to its corporate customers. The Accountis platform uses UBL standards for its documents. RBS has signed a multi-year contract for Accountis's electronic invoice presentment and payment (EIPP) technology which it will use to provide VAT-compliant e-invoicing services to corporate customers in the UK.

The eProcurement Forum, the DG Internal Market and Services and IDABC e-Invoicing and e-Ordering project of the European Commission and the CEN Workshop on Business Interoperability Interfaces for Public Procurement are inviting European organizations to complete their eProcurement online questionnaire.

The Swedish National Financial Management Authority has published a press release regarding status for e-invoicing in Swedish government. Sweden's Svefaktura is a profile of UBL.

Most important is that 205 out of 221 agencies can send and receive e-invoices today. Workplans are in place for adopting new routines, connecting suppliers and preparing for the entire be-procurement business process.

The Electronic Freight Management (EFM) initiative is a US Department of Transport sponsored project that applies Web technologies that improve data and message transmissions between supply chain partners.

EFM uses UBL documents and a federated set of web services to create an exciting new platform for tracking freight through a supply chain.

The CEFM (Columbus EFM) project is a test recently concluded using an existing supply chain. For details see the web site below.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced a new release of the XML Schema Quality of Design Tool (QOD) from the Manufacturing Engineering Lab. "QOD assists in consistently using XML Schema for the specification of information. QOD is intended for both people developing guidelines for writing high quality XML schemas and those writing XML schemas. The purpose of QOD is to improve the quality of the XML schemas. The system allows users to define rules for writing quality XML Schemas and to test schemas against those rules.