UN/CEFACT projects and plans are on track

The UN/CEFACT Forum held its 19th session at the Palais des Nations in Geneva from 16 to 20 April. Public-private sector participants included more than 90 business and technology experts from 31 UN Member States, UN and other international organizations, such as UNESCAP, ITC, ISO, EU and other stakeholders. Experts located around the globe also contributed through teleconferencing.

In particular, the forum focused on business processes both for governments and for the private sector in the field of electronic business and trade facilitation. Gait Boxman of TIE Kinetix participated in the development of one of the core UN/CEFACT deliverables: the UN/EDIFACT Directories.

Current projects and plans by UN/CEFACT

The Forum progressed current projects and plans for future developments as well as maintenance of existing recommendations and standards.

• In particular, the Supply Chain Programme Development Areas (PDA) addressed current projects, such as migration to the Core Component Library version 3.0, encompassing Cross Industry Invoice, eTendering, Contract Financial Execution Management and eNotification.
• According to UN/CEFACT’s cross domain approach the Supply Chain and Trade & Transport Facilitation PDAs held strategic joint meetings focusing on the relationship between the Supply Chain Council’s Operations Reference Model (SCOR) and UN/CEFACT’s Buy-Ship-Pay model.
• Detailed discussions were held to ensure the technology framework underpinning UN/CEFACT’s deliverables was simple, pragmatic, facilitative and, above all, achievable. This focused on foundational libraries, coordination with ISO (and other SDOs) to provide supporting methodologies and technologies as well as strengthening maintenance for UN/EDIFACT.
• It was announced that the Core Component Library 12A was ready for publication. XML Schema for the Core Component Library 11B was sent for validation. Data maintenance requests  for EDIFACT Directory 12A were resolved and changes to the EDIFACT production process introduced by revisions to the publication format of UN/EDIFACT (R.1023) were implemented, enabling EDIFACT 11B to be sent for validation.
• A session on “Reliable message exchange between communities” in which experts from the Russian Federation, European Commission, Public eProcurement and OASIS presented requirements and approaches to the secure cross border exchange of electronic business documents.
• The Agricultural Domain made significant progress in several projects as well as introducing new projects for the exchange of data in the agro-industry.
• The enhancement of UN/CEFACT communications was also an important topic. This included improving the circulation and exchange of information inside the UN/CEFACT community through a new Online Forum, which will be accessible shortly through the UN/CEFACT website at www.unece.org/cefact/index.html