Standards Focus Committee

The Reverse Logistics Standards Committee is organized to explore and promote cross industry standards that facilitate reverse logistics process optimization. It is a venue for all of the reverse logistics stake-holders to develop a common vocabulary and data-set upon which standards can be based.

The goal of the Standards Committee is to generate a lexicon of terms related to the business processes of reverse logistics and to generate XBRL tags related to these terms. These tags can be adopted to standardize the forms and reports relevant to these processes.

The process is based upon a community consensus model through the maintenance of a wiki dedicated to this purpose. A discussion forum has been created to allow for open dialog about the entries. Permission to edit the wiki is restricted to committee members though membership is open to all professionals who apply. To apply, contact one of the editors listed on the Contributors page.

The instructions to edit a wiki are provided in help files included in the Glossary on the Lexicon page.

Reverse Logistics Lexicon
Standards Charter

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Announcements and Minutes

There have been three phone conference meetings of the Standards Committee and one caucus meeting at the RLA Las Vegas RLA conference in February 2007. At the last meeting, it was decided that no additional phone conferences were needed at this time, and that the committee would move into a "work mode." For the next time period, communications will be by email and the RL Forum.

The framework for the standards has now been posted. Mechanics for discussing each item using the RL Forum is established. Members are now asked to contribute and build the data that will be used for the content of the XBRL tags-- the ultimate goal of the process.

The time frame for this phase of the project is approximately three months. A meeting will be called around the time of the next RLA Conference: in Amsterdam, June 26-27, 2007. At that time, the content building phase of this project will end and the general membership will be asked to discuss the report. That process will continue until the next RLA Trade Show, scheduled for October 2-4, 2007 in Singapore.

At that time, a subcommittee will be nominated which will begin the process of lobbying other standard bodies such as the XBRL.ORG to support the resulting proposals. Finally at the RLA Exhibit next February 5-6, 2008 in Las Vegas, an entire track will be dedicated to the implementation of these standards.

If there are any comments or discussion on this issue, please visit the Standards Topic on the RL Forum.