The Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) is on a mission to digitalise global trade by addressing some of the biggest challenges facing governments, businesses and people today. Among the four challenges1we have identified, perhaps the steepest one is around standards for interoperability. With hundreds of electronic and digital standards in use across the global supply chain — and many more in development to enable paperless trade — the task of building a cohesive system is immense.
From the outset, a key objective of ICC DSI has been to make sense of these standards at a macro or ecosystem level. After 18 months of intensive collaboration with over 60 organisations, we published the Key Trade Documents and Data Elements (KTDDE) report in April 2024. This framework for digitalising the international supply chain references digital standards for every key trade process, represented by essential trade documents, ensuring that core and shared
data can be interoperated and shared wherever needed.
This integrated system-wide framework marks an important step forward by providing clarity and a unified set of best practices for all stakeholders. However,
to drive real change, we must pair this macro-level framework with micro-level
guidelines that provide practical steps for implementation at every point in the supply chain. This is about changing the behaviour of organisations and individuals, whether they are public or private, large or small. We needed to answer the critical question: “But what do I do with it?”
To address this, we have compiled 22 cases that highlight the digitalisation of key
functions along the supply chain, particularly focusing on areas where the use of digital trade documents and data standards is critical. Certainly, digital transformation is not new—and we do not claim to provide a comprehensive guide to transforming an entire supply chain. Yet, we hope that this report makes a timely contribution by providing practical insights for businesses and governments seeking to implement the KTDDE vision.
Our aim is, of course, to educate, but more importantly, to motivate businesses
to take more steps to digitalise their key trade processes, by showing that there are many different routes to transformation. And while we did want to show cost and benefit analysis, in the end, we found that the process does not necessarily line up so neatly. There are definitely costs to digitalisation, but the benefits are quite significant, too. In some cases, customer needs or compliance cannot be achieved without digitalisation.
Governments play a crucial role in this transformation, providing policy leadership,
controlling borders, and taking proactive steps to support digital trade. Our goal here is to articulate for governments just how businesses are grappling with the tasks of digital transformation—in all its diversity— so that public sector officials may become more informed and make policy that is in tune with where business needs to go.
Source: ICC DSI