Following the success of the event at Leeds Castle in 2003, SITPRO’s licensee network met in October 2004 at the University of Warwick for the second SITPRO Licensee Forum in order to hear about SITPRO’s latest work and to discuss forthcoming developments.
The Licensee Forum met at the Scarman Conference Centre at the University of Warwick
Alongside discussions about the ways in which the administration of the licensee regime could be improved in the future, one of the key areas of debate was the development of standards for paperless trade. The work on UNeDocsUK, the electronic messaging standard that is being designed to complement the already successful UK Aligned Series of Export Documents, has made significant progress during the past year and SITPRO’s licensees, the printers and software providers who offer the aligned documents to businesses, were particularly keen to discuss how these developments would affect the licensee regime and how they could get involved.
In 2005, a number of SITPRO’s licensees will be promoting trade facilitation through paperless trade at the 4th ASEM Conference on eCommerce, which is being held on 21-22 February in London. ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) is ‘a multilateral forum for action-oriented debate between the EU Member States and Asian partner countries’. SITPRO has become involved with the fourth conference by agreeing to organise the Paperless Trade workshop at the event.
The Paperless Trade workshop will be looking at the paperless trading pilot schemes that are planned between the Asia Europe Alliance for Paperless Trade (ASEAL) initiated by the partners, Korea, France, Germany and the UK and the work being undertaken on International Standards for the electronic transmission of data.
Following presentations on the first day about the stream’s objectives, history and underlying standards, there will be practical demonstrations of the data exchange between international business partners, including the use of the recognised standard electronic documentation UNeDocs and UNeDocsUK, from SITPRO's licensees and other e-commerce partners.
Co-operation with the members of the Asia Europe Alliance for Paperless Trade (KTNET, DAKOSY AG, EDIFRANCE and SITPRO) will provide the stepping-stones to interoperability between trading communities and governments, offering innovative solutions to improve trade and investment flows between Asia and Europe.
Further information about the ASEM conference can be found at www.asemec-london.org and details of all SITPRO’s licensees can be found at www.sitpro.org.uk/documents/.
Return to SITPRO News: Issue 51, Winter 2004/2005
