NES Profiles
NES was established to enable interoperability of procurement data between users of the Universal Business Language (UBL). The essence of interoperability in electronic procurement is to agree on, and define a common set of rules related to both the business process and the content of the electronic messages. NES does this through its Profiles.

NES currently has defined 8 different Proflies:
Profile 1: Catalogue Only
Profile 2: Catalogue with Updates
Profile 3: Basic Order Only
Profile 4: Basic Invoice Only
Profile 5: Basic Billing
Profile 6: Basic Procurement
Profile 7: Simple Procurement
Profile 8: Basic Billing with Dispute Response

See the Profile OverviewPDF document for more details.
The full set  of the current version of the Profile Definitions may also be downloaded as a zip-file.

The NES profiles are describing business processes and scenarios based on a common application of UBL applicable for both domestic and cross border trade. Each profile documents a context specific use of the UBL constrained by business rules and recommendation for the use of the relevant UBL documents.

As well as, initially, restricting the number of documents used, NES restricts document content in terms of elements and the cardinality of elements. NES contains restricted views of the UBL Common Library and the UBL documents listed above (the NES Common Library and NES document libraries).  From these libraries, generic documents are derived e.g. the NES Generic Invoice.  These generic documents are further restricted for particular business process contexts.

These contexts or ‘profiles´ describe design-time rules for documents within processes e.g. in the Basic Procurement profile, an Order is always followed by an Order Response Simple.

The profiles also contain scenarios, describing run-time restrictions e.g. in the Basic Procurement profile, Invoice errors can be resolved by the issue of a supplementary Invoice or a Credit Note, depending on whether the error is an overcharge or an undercharge.

Compliance to NES is measured against one or more of the NES profiles. Any party claiming conformance to a NES profile is expected to:

  • Support all of the functions and business rules described for that profile
  • Be able to send and receive all of the messages defined by the profile
  • Be able to understand all of the elements, mandatory or optional, in the Profiled Message Definitions