Challenges of Paperless Trade: Redesign of the Foreign Trade Processes and Bundling Functions of Traditional Documents

Technological innovations in recent years have resulted in paper based documentation will be completely abandoned in all business processes, however the paper-based processes still prevail in foreign trade transactions due to complicated business processes. Institution and companies in different countries involved in foreign trade transactions. Therefore integrative solutions are needed. This paper seeks to put forward a methodology to pave the way to the future international trade. Therefore we developed a taxonomical approach to this clutter in order to partially surmount the integration problem because a road map should be determined before the holistic solution. Taxonomical approach has been suggested for grouping the foreign trade documents in terms of their functions. All the parties participating in a foreign trade transaction should be able to connect to each other in a single online platform. There is a need for a single online platform of which all parties are members to complete a foreign trade transaction using a single integrated electronic document. Finally, opinions of the professional have been received for seeing the real procedures. Literature and practices have been synthesized and partial solution grouping the foreign trade documents in terms of their functions has been suggested. To constitute a base for the initial step of the road to integrated foreign trade document a taxonomical table has been prepared. Aim of this table to guide the firms that search for solutions to develop electronic equivalent of paper based documents.