Brussels, 16h November 2005: 2005/11/17
HR-XML Seminar in Brussels


Building on the success of the seminar in Frankfurt in June of this year, HR-XML Europe organized a further event in Brussels on November 16th. The event focussed on the localization of the SIDES and SEP standards by the European Workgroups launched in Frankfurt and on a new initiative to develop a standardised Competency framework.

During the panel discussion

Focus on Localisation of HR-XML Standards for Europe
Building on the success of the seminar in Frankfurt in June of this year, HR-XML Europe organized a further event in Brussels on November 16th. The event focussed on the localization of the SIDES and SEP standards by the European Workgroups launched in Frankfurt and on a new initiative to develop a standardised Competency framework.

The Frankfurt seminar attracted HR professionals from 13 countries. The event focused on standardization activities in two fields: online recruitment and data exchange between staffing organizations and their customers. Participants at the seminar established European working groups to further develop these standards and to support and promote their adoption in Europe. 

The seminar was held at Le Meridien Hotel in Brussels and was open to both members of HR-XML Europe and to HR professionals and technology professionals working in the HR field.
You can find all the presentations in our download area.

The European SIDES Workgroup

The Staffing Industry Data Exchange Standard, SIDES, was developed to streamline data interchange between software applications in order to automate the procurement of human capital by enterprise customers from staffing companies. The standard is made up of schemas that offer a significant head start to integrators connecting staffing companies, third-party services (such as vendor management systems, payroll providers), and end customers.
The underlying principle is to enable participants to automate data exchange with multiple vendors and customers through the highly reusable SIDES interface. The SIDES standard is comprehensive, spanning the core front- and back-office business processes, thereby providing enormous opportunities to automate data exchange and save businesses money and time.

At the seminar, the European SIDES workgroup presented three case studies of applications of SIDES and of the business benefits achieved. Attendees thus developed a better understanding of the practical advantages that can be achieved through the use of the standard.

The first case study covered SENS (Soap Enterprise Nerve System) which is an initiative to support data exchange across extranet, intranet, internet and legacy applications using web services, XML, HR-XML and SIDES.

The second case study described PIXID, a French project built to enable the exchange of all necessary documents for staffing:contracts, timesheets and invoices. PIXID uses standards that were developed by SIDES France building on the base HR-XML guidelines.
 
The third project is under development in The Netherlands and focusses on exchanging data relating to temporary labour between all participants. The project is being conducted in conjunction with the local industry organization.
 
The general focus of the European SIDES workgroup is to address issues of particular importance to European HR professionals, including:

• Establish the state of adoption of SIDES in Europe and the experience of users
• Define how and where SIDES can be effectively exploited
• dentify (possible) localization needs
• Investigate standardization of clusters of job titles. This will be a pilot project to establish whether HR-XML Europe should take on the role of adding local taxonomies to standards.
• Define the business case for software vendors to support these standards in their products.
  
  Organizations, companies or individuals who wish to join this workgroup should contact the chairperson:
  
  Bernard Ypersiel
  Bernard.Ypersiel@Solvus.BE
  
  
  The European SEP Workgroup
  
  The Staffing Exchange Protocol (SEP) is a set of XML specifications that supports many types of recruiting and staffing transactions. These include the posting of jobs to job boards and company career sites, and the exchange of a candidate details. The most recent version of SEP was designed with multi-national input from a variety of stakeholder groups including end-user organizations, state employment services, recruitment companies, job boards/career portal sites, applicant tracking systems and service providers, assessment providers and HRIS vendors.
  
  Over the last few months, the HR-XML Consortium has been conducting a critical review of the current SEP 2.3 standard. This has created the opportunity to put forward and incorporate many of the comments raised by participants at the last HR-XML Europe meeting held in Frankfurt in June 2005.
  The next release of the SEP standard, including the feedback from HR-XML Europe, has been finalized at the HR-XML international meeting in Nashville in early October and is now awaiting formal approval. This consolidated release of SEP will provide the platform for the European SEP workgroup to develop its requirements and proposals to address specific European needs.
  
  Organizations, companies or individuals who wish to join this workgroup should contact the chairperson:
  
  Ingolf Teetz
  I.Teetz@Milchundzucker.DE
  
  
  The Competencies Workgroup
  
  There is increasing acceptance that the notion of “lifelong learning” will also require a "lifelong competency framework", able to span education, industry and employment services domains. HR-XML Europe’s Competency Workgroup has therefore decided to establish a two-year CEN/ISSS Workshop which will lead to a CWA (CEN Workshop Agreement).
  
  This project will lead to an "alignment recommendation" for the existing standards initiatives within which they can advance and further synchronize their current Competency specifications to address lifelong learning issues. The workshop, which is currently being prepared, already has committed support from many communities of practice and standards bodies concerned with sharing and standardising competencies, including IMS, IEEE, and all chapters of HR-XML, as well as the top three Integrated Projects (IPs) of the 5th "Technology-enhanced Learning" call of the IST FP6 program.
  
  Organizations, companies or individuals who wish to join this workgroup should contact the chairperson
  
  Luk Vervenne
  luk@synergetics.be
  
  
  About HR-XML Europe HR-XML Consortium Europe is the European branch of the international HR-XML Consortium. We are an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to the development and promotion of data interchange standards to enable e-business and the automation of human resources-related data exchanges.
  The goal of HR-XML Europe is to ensure that local requirements and subject-matter expertise are leveraged wherever possible to strengthen core HR-XML standards. HR-XML Europe will also coordinate the growing number of country-specific HR data standards initiatives within Europe. Human resources-related e-business – or any inter-company exchange of HR data – requires an agreement among participants about how the transaction or data exchange will be accomplished.
  
  The intent of HR-XML Europe is to spare employers and vendors the risk and expense of having to negotiate and agree upon data interchange mechanisms on an ad-hoc basis. By developing and publishing open data exchange standards based on Extensible Markup Language ("XML"), the Consortium provides the means for any company to transact with other companies without having to establish, engineer, and implement many separate interchange mechanisms.
  In Europe, with its wide variety of cultures, legislation and business practices, the goal is to develop and promote data exchange standards that successfully embrace local, national, and international requirements.