September 2007
Inventory XSD
The Inventory XSD is a standard defined to facilitate the exchange of product inventory balances. Shipping facilities today maintain inventories on which products are owned by which stock or position holders. They also maintain physical inventories of what products are contained in which tanks in their facilities. The former is the purpose for defining the Inventory XSD. Today there is no standard which provides consistency in acquiring and sending the inventory information. The formats and methods by which product owners of product through the terminal facilities receive this information varies with the shipping facility, as well as, by the capabilities of their rack automation systems or the service they subscribe to. Typically this information is available through the rack automation system, however, nothing precludes the shipping facility's ERP from providing the information, possibly in yet another format. This XSD defines the attributes that are necessary to properly report a position holder's product inventory at a particular facility at a specified effective date.


PDXR version 4.0
The PDXR V4.0 standard is a flat file record format and communications protocol defined for use by the rack automations system who need to authenticate and monitor allocations utilization with a vended service. The standard is implemented to provide a common format for real-time communications, regardless of the vended service or the flavor of rack automation system. Contained within the protocol, is a request from the rack automation system for approval or authentication, a corresponding approval or denial notification and, if approved, the results of the loading process. The loading process yields a bill of lading transaction that contains all the pertinent information necessary to describe the activity. Among the data captured is the product, customer, shipper, volume and many other attributes specific to the transaction.


RECON (Version 3.1 of the EDI Standard)
The "RECON" EDI Standard is used by oil industry "Exchange" partners. It defines the format of the month-end text file that should be provides to each exchange partner. the data in the file represents the monthly exchange activity between the partners and is intended to be used to reconcile (by exchange contract) the 2 partners exchange transactional activity for the month.

Attached (below) is the latest version 3.1 - (this modified version has been sent out for review and comments and incorporates changes requested by industry users of the standard).

The RECON version 2 is the primary standard in use today.

The version 3 update was put into place to extend the record to allow the inclusion of individual exchange fees rates with more decimal places (version 2 was limited to 3 fee rates with 7 decimal places - with implied decimal point). However, with the expansion of ethanol usage and the relatively high price of ethanol, in 2006 we had the scenario arise where exchange fees exceeding $1, which the "RECON" standard could not handle.

The changes made in version 3.1 (from version 3.0) are the addition of 2 digits and a fixed decimal point to the exchange fees fields (Rate 1 through Rate 7). The changes are due to the decimal point from an implied decimal point to a fixed, included decimal point (only for Rate 1 through Rate 7). These changes were made to the exchange fee rate fields (Rate 1 through Rate 7) located in the Type 2 record and starting in column 113 and beyond. These changes were necessary because some companies recently experienced exchange fees greater then $1.00. The original "RECON" standard assumed that all exchange fees would be under $1.00.

* Any comments or concerns regarding these standards should be raised with the Downstream eBusiness Chair, Jean-Yves Albert, before Tuesday, July 19, 2007