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Australian Report On Progress Towards the Paperless Trading GoalsIn APECˇ¦s Blueprint for Action on Electronic Commerce
CCF will:
• provide TCP/IP and voice access 365 days of the year;
• facilitate use of digital certification by Customs clients ˇV representing some 150,000 importers, exporters, Customs brokers, freight forwarders and airlines ˇV through use of the Australian Business Number ˇV Digital Signature Certificate (discussed elsewhere in this report);
• use standard EDI message formats as well as emerging standards such as XML, and
• accept electronic payments, including over the Internet.
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The Australian Quarantine & Inspection Serviceˇ¦s (AQIS) Electronic Export Documentation System (EXDOC) and SANCRT electronic certificate.
A key feature of EXDOC is the ability to generate a globally acceptable electronic health certificate designed to remove the need for paper certificates where importing countries accept this. This electronic certificate, called SANCRT (pronounced san-cert) has been used to clear all Australian edible meat shipments into Japan since March 1998.
In a bid to deliver further efficiencies to clients, AQIS has actively pursued the use of SANCRT with a number of our Asian trading partners in recent years to a point where it is now contemplating trials with Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and the Republic of Korea. AusAID funding has been made available to assist the process with four of these ASEAN economies. A trial commenced with Canada in March 2000. Australia submitted a project proposal to TPT-WG meeting in March that will provide opportunities for other APEC economies to trial SANCRT.
While we are currently using SANCRT for meat health certificates, we have flagged with these countries our intention to expand the trials to cover certification for other commodities as they come onto EXDOC. AQIS has also agreed it will trial the receipt of incoming SANCRT messages via the AQIS AIMS system.
The ability to transmit government to government certification via EXDOC/SANCRT opens the way for individual exporters to interact in a similar manner with those commercial entities involved in the export chain. These include land, sea and air transport, banks, insurance companies etc. It is estimated there is at least a 75 to 85 percent data commonality in respect of information passed by the exporter to government in Australia and to the commercial sector in respect of each individual shipment.
For some time work has been underway in Australia in both the public and private sectors in an attempt to develop electronic message mechanisms that will enable exporters to transact their export clearance business using single data entry principles. AQIS believes this is a critical next step to ensure export industries gain the full benefits offered by paperless trading.
Rail Hub Project
The Rail Hub project (www.tradegate.org.au ) is aimed at providing electronic facilities covering transactions between an inland exporter and container terminals using rail as the land transport carrier. The project involves a facility, through a Tradegate ECA bureau service, for converting EDI messages to non-EDI electronic forms and vice-versa, and includes use of EDI via the Internet as well as Internet web forms [next page]