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Killer solution to international trade?
Cargill, the Minneapolis-based international marketing, processing, and distribution company, expects to save millions of dollars a year by signing up with a new electronic trading community.When bolero.net opened its virtual doors for business on September 27, Cargill was the first applicant for membership.A week later Bolero was claiming some 2,000 hits on its Web site.
Trading partners and intermediaries (such as freight forwarders, banks, and customs departments) can use Bolero to exchange electronically the complex documentation required to ensure that payment for goods is released only when certainty of receipt can be guaranteed. These documents-for example, a bill of lading providing proof of goods loaded at a port-must be correct in all respects and guaranteed tamperproof for transactions to proceed smoothly, so trading partners have traditionally needed to send original documents across the globe. Since the International Maritime Bureau estimates that 20% of all goods shipped are wrongly documented, this results in considerable delays. Take the example of dresses shipped to Europe from Hong Kong. If the belts are held up at customs because of a documentation error, the goods cannot go into shops, and working capital is tied up for several more days. So the ability to exchange such documents electronically and control the quality of input through electronic forms offers huge potential savings.
The problem has been addressed before. Electronic data interchange was the great hope of the 1970s and '80s, but despite the efforts of the UNdriven Edifact standards committees to create universally agreed-on standard message formats, proprietary solutions (based on variations of Edifact or other standards) hindered the development of a critical mass of users. And the costs of connection to such systems were just too high for many of the smaller members of the international trading community.
So why should Bolero be different? According to Peter Scott, commercial director, his organization provides four key requirements for...