Five new extensions enter the standard as Working Drafts — receipt & three-way match, supplier performance, contract amendments, framework agreements, and negotiation — extending SIGNET across the whole procurement lifecycle.
SIGNET began where governance mattered most: sourcing events, governed agent decisions, and a tamper-evident record. With today's publications, the standard now specifies coverage across all three pillars of procurement — sourcing, purchasing, and supplier management.
The five new Working Drafts:
- Receipt & three-way match (
receipt) — a receipt/acceptance object and a governed match: whether an invoice reconciles against order and receipt becomes a mandate-bound decision under a machine-readable tolerance policy — auto-clearable by an agent within its authority, human-gated on exceptions. - Supplier performance (
performance) — service levels as machine-readable policy, derived and event-anchored performance assessments, and — for the first time — a driver for the qualification lifecycle: sustained breach is what moves a supplier to conditional or suspended status. - Contract amendments (
amendments) — contracts evolve as event-anchored deltas over an immutable original, so current state is derivable and history is tamper-evident by construction; value increases above threshold require named human approval. - Framework agreements (
frameworks) — frameworks and call-offs (direct award and mini-competition), with the drawdown ceiling as a conformance-checkable invariant rather than a report. - Negotiation (
negotiation) — offers and counter-offers over declared terms, with each party's concessions bounded by per-term mandates the harness enforces — the auction demonstration's sealed-floor mechanic, generalised.
All five follow the spec-first process the standard's governance established: publication as a Working Draft, Standards Committee review, then schemas, worked examples, and machine-runnable conformance rules per extension. Four earlier extensions — supplier onboarding, auctions, identity & verifiable approval, and commodity risk — have already completed that path and are machine-certifiable today, on identical terms for every implementer.
The specifications are open (CC0) and published in the standard repository: docs/extensions.
Concert Foundation stewards SIGNET as a neutral standard. No implementer — commercial or otherwise — receives a preferential path.