United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

Geneva, 13 May 2003

UNECE AND SITPRO TO DEVELOP TOOLKIT OF
ELECTRONIC TRADE DOCUMENTS FOR WORLD TRADE COMMUNITY

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), together with Britain´s trade facilitation agency, SITPRO Ltd., will jointly develop a Toolkit containing a set of United Nations electronic Trade Documents (UNeDocs). The Toolkit, which is expected to be released towards the end of 2003, is intended to support and complement national and sub-regional initiatives in trade facilitation, to increase trade, attract investment and help countries become more integrated in regional and world trade.

In technical assistance projects the Toolkit can serve as a national blueprint, transferring experiences and lessons learnt. Its flexible design will allow countries to enter the project at whatever level they choose, according to their readiness to implement trade facilitation standards and electronic business.

The kit will be based on UNECE’s global recommendations for trade facilitation and electronic business, such as the UN Layout Key for Trade Documents, the revised UN Trade Data Element Directory, UN/EDIFACT and document data modelling. It will also be based on SITPRO`S “ElecTra”, a set of electronic documents for UK trade, developed to facilitate UK trade and transport. Integration of the ElecTra set in UNeDocs will help to share the gains in trade efficiency and standardization with other trading countries.

The Toolkit will contain - in both paper and electronic format - a set of core documents for international trade, such as Quotation, Purchase Order, Commercial Invoice, Consignment (Document) Despatch, Export Cargo Shipping Instruction: Instructions from the exporter to the freight forwarder, Non Negotiable Sea Waybill, IMMTA Multimodal Transport Document, Certificate of Origin, SAD, and International Road Consignment.

For each document it will provide the paper form, completion guidelines for the user, a model describing the data content and guidelines, style sheets and schemas to send the document in UN/EDIFACT and XML and an e-learning capacity-building module.

To provide countries with access to simple and low-cost software solutions for UNeDocs documents, the Toolkit will also support direct mapping to industry-specific XML implementations such as UBL. The Toolkit will be made available on the Internet to Governments and trade associations, as well as through technical assistance projects.

The prototype for the set of documents in the Toolkit is the UNeDocs release of the Freight Forwarding Instructions document of the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations (FIATA), available on www.UNeDocs.org

UNECE and SITPRO have set up a joint project coordination team, as well as a team to develop the document toolkit and to provide the materials for publishing the toolkit on the Internet.

The UNeDocs project is a technical cooperation activity of UNECE to promote the knowledge-based economy and to help countries integrate into global trade. The UNeDocs project management is supported by an Advisory Board of stakeholders, which directly represents the interests of donors, implementing agencies, recipient countries, UN regional commissions and other UN agencies.

For further information: UNeDocs@unece.org

About UNeDocs:

UNeDocs is a project of the United Nations to develop and implement international trade documents in paper and electronic format. The documents are based on the United Nations Layout Key, internationally recognized standards for trade. UNeDocs does not aim to replace paper documents but rather to provide international trade with electronic equivalents of the paper documents on which today’s global trading system is built. Traders and administrations can then choose the types of document that suit their needs. UNeDocs electronic documents take full advantage of Internet-based technologies. Documents in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) can be processed on PCs equipped with standard office software. They also provide access to intelligent, Internet-based services, which add features such as compliance, risk assessment, advance information exchange, security and logistics integration. Further information available at www.UNeDocs.org. A prototype of UNeDocs Web Services for Digital Paper can be accessed at www.unemed.org/edocs/onlineaccess.jsp

About UNECE:

Within the UN system the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) has the mandate to develop global standards for trade facilitation and electronic business. It has developed numerous standards for trade documentation, such as the United Nations Layout Key for paper documents and UN/EDIFACT for electronic documents. In its UNeDocs project UNECE combines these standards with the latest Internet technologies to provide the international trade community with an integrated solution for paper and electronic trade documents.

About SITPRO:

SITPRO Ltd. is the UK’s Trade Facilitation Agency, supported by the UK Department of Trade & Industry. A non-profit organization, it is solely committed to the removal of barriers to international trade and to making international transactions more cost effective. A core part of this activity has been to focus on the efficient use, low cost exchange of information and documentation for international trade. Close collaboration between SITPRO and UNECE has enabled the development of WebElecTra as a prototype for UNeDocs.

Ref: ECE/TRADE/03/P04