The United Nations is launching an e-business initiative for increased transparency in product claims using digital methods. The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) has issued a White Paper on Digital Product Conformity Certificate Exchange, emphasizing reliable claims for market trust. The paper proposes a digital framework to connect data sources for better product compliance insight.
This initiative addresses challenges in verifying conformity certificates and ensuring up-to-date information. While engagement with industries is a hurdle, the UN/CEFACT plans to apply these ideas to specific product categories, seeking input from government-approved experts.
The exchange of conformity assessment attestations between supply chain actors represents a critical element in modern global trade. The existing paper-based processes come with well-recognised problems. However, the necessary procedures, semantics and legal framework to enable transition to fully digitalised attestation systems have not been agreed. This paper explores new possibilities that arise when framing the problem in terms of access to (rather than exchange of) conformity attestations. It also proposes the use of technology to link conformity attestations to physical product supply as a way to address existing problems. The paper also points to ways in which such framing may provide a natural structure for the future transition to fully digitalised systems, while noting that detailed exploration of such is outside the scope of this paper. The findings are as follows:
1. There is a need for linking conformity attestations with physical product and to manage revision and issuing authority status.
2. The lack of any consistent processes for exchange of conformity attestations is a barrier to interoperability.
3. Paper-based exchange of conformity attestations is inherently affected by legal ambiguities & exploitable loopholes which can exacerbate other process shortcomings.
4. There are gaps in the existing legal frameworks for cross-border data exchange. Therefore, any work towards digital exchange systems for conformity attestations must be made in the knowledge that the environment is defined and likely to change, which could have implications for future choices of identifiers and specific digital technologies. Refer Section
5. The critical data elements relating to conformity attestation exchange are dominated by identifiers and further work is needed to review the CEFACT data models having potential relevance to the identifiers of interest. It is further noted that established systems already exist for creating the types of linkages required to address the problem statement, including the use of globally unique identifiers.
6. Managing revision status is more complex than might first appear and a variety of incompatible approaches are being taken to address this. An important insight is that conformity assessment bodies (CABs), or the parties (such as Scheme Owners) acting on their behalf in providing access to conformity data, are central to the process and that exchanging links to attestations may be more effective than exchanging attestations.
7. A set of complementary processes based on linked data can be expressed in generic terms that should serve to address the problem statement.
8. While the technology exists to achieve selective suppression of sensitive data, this cannot be consistently implemented due to the fractured way conformity attestations are currently exchanged. A more central role for CABs may make more consistent application of technology possible, from a process perspective.
You can read the full paper from here