Fifty years of trade facilitation
Twenty years of electronic business standards
Geneva, 29 October 2007 -- Fifty years of trade facilitation and
20 years of United Nations Electronic Data Interchange standards have provided
the backbone for electronic business in today’s international trade.
In her welcome address at the autumn 2007 Forum of the United Nations Centre
for Trade Facilitation and electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) in Stockholm, Ms.
Ewa Björling, Minister for Foreign Trade stressed that for the past fifty
years Swedish Governments have put simplification for companies, agencies,
local authorities and regions high on their agenda.
Back in 1957, Sweden realized the value of standardizing trade documents.
Supported by the other Nordic countries, it brought the matter before the
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), which promptly set
up a working group on trade facilitation. The successor to this group is today’s
UN/CEFACT, the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic
Business.
Jointly with ISO Technical Committee 154 (International Organization for
Standardization), UNECE drew up some basic standards for trade documents,
all of which are still being used in international trade. They include the:
Forms Design Sheet and Layout Chart; Layout Key for Trade Documents; United
Nations Trade Data Element Directory; Country codes; Currency codes; Dates
and Times1.
Already twenty years ago, UNECE saw that the universal acceptance of the
United Nations Layout Key for paper-based trade documents and data had created
a sound basis for standardizing EDI (electronic data interchange)2.
In 1987, ISO approved the UN/EDIFACT syntax rules for EDI (ISO standard 9735);
and two years later, UN/CEFACT published the invoice and order UN/EDIFACT
messages.
According to a recent Forrester research report,3 EDI
transactions represent around 90 per cent of all electronic transactions.
They continue to dominate business-to-business electronic communications worldwide,
with an estimated 20 million messages exchanged every day.
Between 1989 and the present, 208 UN/EDIFACT messages have been published.
These messages facilitate the exchange of information in many areas including:
transport; Customs; government and business tendering; just-in-time manufacturing;
and finance.
Today, UN/CEFACT and its network of around 1,000 technical experts, continues
to build on its experience in order to support ever more simplified trade
processes and the global standardization of trade and business information.
New areas of work include the development of data libraries that can be
used across different, evolving hardware and software technologies as well
as projects to facilitate the transition from paper to electronic documents
for small and medium-sized companies.
In concluding, Minister Björling stated, “I am pleased that
we have come a long way in Swedish Customs procedures. Who could have imagined
that, in certain cases, lorry drivers today would only need to send an
SMS message via a mobile telephone for customs clearance?”
For further information on the Forum, see www.unece.org/cefact or
contact:
| |
Mike Doran
Chair, UN/CEFACT Forum
Management Group
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: +41 (0) 22 767 1872
|
Jean Kubler
Chief, Global Trade Solutions Branch
UNECE Trade and Timber Division
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: +41 (0) 22 917 2774 |
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1 Also published as ISO
standards 3535, 6422, 7372, 3166, 4217 and 8601. These are downloadable
free of charge from the UNECE website at: www.unece.org/cefact/recommendations/rec_index.htm
2 A detailed explanation
of EDI can be found at the following address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Data_Interchange
3Forrester Research, Inc.
Ken Vollmer “B2B Integration Trends: Message Formats”. B2B
Trends 2007 series, No. 1. Ken Vollmer is a principal analyst in Forrester's
Application Development & Infrastructure research group, covering trends,
issues, and strategies related to all forms of integration, including business
process management (BPM), enterprise application integration (EAI), B2B
integration (B2Bi), and electronic data interchange (EDI).