Your invoices live in SAP. Your sourcing runs through Ariba. Your case work sits in a platform someone bought a decade ago. None of them speak to each other, and none of them speak SIGNET.
Translators fix that — at the edge, under mandate, without ever letting a foreign shape cross into the core.
A translation agent reads records from one named source system and recasts them as valid SIGNET objects — transcription, not arrangement. It is the only kind of component permitted to touch both a native format and the core boundary, and it operates under a server-enforced mandate that names exactly what it may read, exactly what it may write, and nothing else.
Three rules govern the boundary. We call them the membrane rules, and every translator we build is constituted by them:
Nothing enters the core unless it is a valid SIGNET object. Pinned schema version, applicable profile, validated before write. Validation is not a report that runs afterwards; the write path refuses invalid objects.
Core agents emit SIGNET only. Outbound formatting into a destination system's dialect is translator work, never core work.
No foreign shape crosses the membrane. No source field name appears in any core object, prompt, or tool schema. Fields with no SIGNET home are routed through the extension mechanism or deliberately dropped — with the omission recorded in the mapping specification, where it can be seen and challenged.
A translator that infers, enriches, summarises, or fills gaps is out of mandate. Where a source record is ambiguous, the translator quarantines it. It never guesses.
This is the epistemic foundation of a canonical core: every object in it is either a faithful recasting with full provenance, or a domain agent's cited synthesis — never a blend of the two. You can trust the score precisely because the transcription was not allowed to improvise.
Every translated object carries its provenance: which agent translated it, from which source record, under which mapping specification, at what time. Every batch emits events into a hash-chained trail. And every feed runs under a quarantine ceiling — a circuit breaker that halts a systematically broken batch rather than flooding your quarantine store, because a broken feed is an incident, not a data-quality statistic.
Every translator follows the same five movements:
Mapping specification. Field by field: source field → SIGNET path, transform rule, codelist mapping, deliberate omissions with reasons, quarantine rules for every ambiguity. Reviewed and signed by your data owner before build starts. The specification is the contract; everything after it is performance.
Golden suite. Native-format fixtures paired with the exact SIGNET objects they must produce — including negative fixtures that must quarantine on precisely the declared reason codes. The suite is green in CI before the translator ships, and green in your environment before it runs.
The translator. Deployed and verified at the edge before any core agent depends on it.
Reconciliation harness. Domain-specific balance checks, runnable per batch: totals reconcile, counts match source, lifecycle sequences obey the state machine.
Operations handover. Replay procedure, quarantine triage, halt and resume. Your team operates; we stand behind the build.
Replay is idempotent — re-running any batch produces no duplicates, and any historical window can be replayed. Replays version objects; nothing is silently overwritten. The trail stays whole.
Supplier invoice records recast into the EN 16931 / Peppol-aligned shape the standard defines, with round-trip verification to UBL. Credit memos handled per the semantic model, not sign-flipping hacks. The substrate for spend views, invoice reporting, and briefing assertions.
RFx and auction activity represented canonically — sourcing events, submissions, evaluations, awards — with every lifecycle transition emitted as a hash-chained event. One sourcing reality, regardless of where the event ran.
Legacy case platforms, bespoke line-of-business systems, transitional estates being strangled. We specify economically, build to the same standard, and — where a translator exists to be retired — plan its retirement from day one.
Each catalogue translator is a proven core configured to your estate: your extracts, your codelists, your edge cases. You own your configuration. The instrument stays in tune because we maintain it.
Talk to us about your source systems →We build and verify against synthetic fixtures and specimen formats — field layouts, codelists, anonymised structural examples. Never live extracts. Production translators run inside your environment boundary: we build and verify, you operate. Nothing source-formatted leaves your edge zone, and quarantined records stay in an access-controlled store on your side of the membrane.
Read our full operating posture → /trustSIGNET is an open standard — anyone may implement it. Concert stewards the standard and its extensions, neutrally. Score Networks is a licensed operator: we build the translators, the tooling, and the operational discipline that put the standard to work.
When our mapping work surfaces a field with no SIGNET home, we file it with Concert as an extension issue. The standard gets better because implementations push on it — that is the arrangement working as designed.
A scoping conversation takes an hour. A mapping specification takes weeks, not quarters — and you'll know the full shape of the work before you commit to the build.
Commission a translator →