In February UN/CEFACT took its Capacity Building Roadshow to Kuala Lumpur to promote how international standards can stimulate paperless trading. Hosted by Dagang Net Technologies, the Malaysian e-Commerce and Customs Systems Provider, and jointly organised by SITPRO, the five-day Workshop delivered a programme that mixed presentations on the benefits of international standards with technical sessions giving practical, hands-on experience of working with Data Models and mapping data requirements.
The highlight was the announcement from the World Customs Organisation that they now considered their Customs Data Model to be a 'subset' of the International Trade Data Model at the heart of the rapidly developing UNeDocs digital paper standard. This followed the keynote speech in which Madam Hiswani Harun of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry said that Malaysia was committed to adopting international standards - an assurance reinforced by Saifol Shamlan, Chief Executive of Dagang Net, when he declared that they were ready to implement the UNeDocs standards.
In the first two days of the Workshop delegates from the public and private sectors representing 19 countries heard experts describe the challenges in the move to paperless trading and how to manage the migration. Presenters emphasised that the full benefits of going paperless can only be achieved if the solutions are based on international standards. Building on these foundations a country could create a more efficient and effective trading environment and optimise the implementation of a Single Window for the exchange of trade related data between government and business. National and Industry sector representatives also presented Case Studies that showed varied and various approaches to implementing international standards. Two particularly innovative projects were described by the air and sea transport industries that aim to pilot paperless trading chains from origin to destination. These projects will tackle some age-old problems such as a paperless solution for official border controls, electronic negotiable Bills of Lading and digital signatures.
The Technical Sessions on the next three days were organised and presented by the UNeDocsUK Project Team who introduced the latest technologies to build compliant data models for international trade. In these interactive sessions, participants used the standards to develop a draft UNeDocs document for the Malaysian Customs Export Declaration. The Customs Declaration was mapped to both the UNeDocs and WCO standards.
Participants also received a briefing on the UN Trade Facilitation Toolkit and Forms Repository, a trade facilitation tool developed by the UN Regional Commissions. The Toolkit supports the trade regulations set out in GATT Articles VIII and X, assists in the simplification of documentary requirements and helps in the development of a consistent national series of trade documents based on the United Nations Layout Key for International Trade Documents. These aligned electronic trade documents can be represented in interactive PDF format.
Return to SITPRO News: Issue 56, Spring 2006
