THE WORLD Trade Organization and the International Chamber of Commerce recently published a toolkit that aims to help companies and government agencies adopt available standards to accelerate the process of digitalising trade.
The report found that “one of the primary barriers to the adoption of paperless processes is a lack of awareness of existing standards for digital trade”.
As a result, the toolkit identifies almost 100 currently available standards, frameworks and initiatives to enable global supply-chain players to speak a universal language.
The report also notes that “fewer than 1% of trade documents are fully digitised globally – with a typical transaction requiring the exchange of 36 documents and 240 copies in hard-copy”.
The report draws on stakeholder consultations through the ICC’s Digital Standards Initiative over the past year.
The Standards Toolkit for Cross-border Paperless Trade provides the international trade community with a comprehensive overview of existing digital trade standards that can be used to facilitate trusted, real-time supply chain collaboration and real-time data exchange.
The report was co-authored by Emmanuelle Ganne, senior analyst at the World Trade Organization and Hannah Nguyen, director of digital ecosystems at the ICC Digital Standards Initiative.
Speaking on the launch of the toolkit, Ms Ganne said: “Our objective is to equip every supply-chain participant with some of the most notable and widely used standards to help push trade digitalisation to the next level.”
Ms Nguyen said the toolkit provides an easy-access guide to the many existing standards for trade digitalisation.
“We hope that building awareness and understanding of these will drive convergence across international supply chains and thus promote genuine interoperability for paperless trade processes,” Ms Nguyen said.
Australian not-for-profit standards development organisation GS1 was referenced in the report. GS1 is one of many standards bodies that works with the ICC and WTO to align on and accelerate the understanding and adoption of global data standards for trade.
GS1 Australia executive director and CEO Maria Palazzolo acknowledged the importance of the digital trade standards toolkit.
“Digital systems and supply chain data are critical to industry competitiveness and the health of our economy,” she said.
“Our challenge is industry and government awareness of what global data standards are and how they work. Without an understanding of how standards work together, industries and countries are inclined to come up with their own way of doing things. This inevitably adds cost and complexity, reducing competitiveness and limits access to international markets.”
Ms Palazzolo said this is an important moment in time.
“Just over 50 years ago industry came together to align on the issue of product identification that resulted in the creation of barcodes as we know them today,” she said.
“Never before have we witnessed government and industry aligning on the important issue of digital supply chains.”
