The Government approved the project to create a database of electronic product certificates.
So many centuries have passed since paper was invented, but it still remains an irreplaceable attribute of our life. However, it must be admitted that letters in envelopes are gradually reaching back; amateurs of fiction study poetry and prose rather from a computer screen; newspapers and magazines are converted into an electronic form… However, it doesn’t mean that paper media disappear for good and irretrievably. The same situation was with electronic documents and commodity circulation, modern technologies bring comfort into our life including the sphere of production. Is it so simple to get rid of old habits?
It is no coincidence that the topic of business-processes automation occurred in Belarus. Clearly built systems help to optimize companies’ internal processes, to develop warehousing and logistic technologies, to accelerate supply of goods to consumers… Observation from outside is pregnant with unpleasant consequences, because you may not fit well into the world trade format and be left in the basket.
The Center of Identification Systems reported that the Government of Belarus had recently considered and approved the project to create a database of electronic product certificates in the republic. Creation of a new information resource named “Bank of electronic product certificates” acts as a platform for the realization of this idea. “If the planned works are implemented from the beginning of the next year, by the end of 2010 it will be possible to bring it to life at a large scale,” thinks the technical director of SE “Center of Identification Systems” Gennady Volnisty. “The work will be very serious, but the existing technological base will make it possible to exclude the circulation of paper documents in trade and shift to the electronic document circulation.” As a first step specialists plan to get orderly working of the national system of goods identification and the system of electronic document circulation. It is supposed that the next stage will be large-scale creation of corporate, departmental, sectorial and national distribution networks and electronic trading systems.
It is difficult to forecast when it will happen. Indeed, electronic versions push up paper documents, but it is not that simple to displace them completely. Companies of the developed countries have been building internal automation systems for years, which was a basis for quick implementation of large-scale electronic commerce systems. Specialists don’t exclude that in Belarus these two processes — internal and external — will develop in parallel. But it is still a question who will win: the initiative from above or sluggishness from below? While introducing electronic document circulation, the majority of organizations face typical problems: conservatism of the personnel, its unwillingness to study something new, weak formalization of business processes, difficulties with the provision of legal force of electronic documents. Besides, some part of the external world will remain a “paper one.” This is why we can’t do without information duplication which involves additional expenses.
Today automated information systems in Belarus are created within the frames of certain state programs. One of such systems is a “Distribution Network of the Ministry of Agricultural Products.” According to Gennady Volnisty, it provides joint and, at the same time, commercially independent work of 90 enterprises of the agroindustrial complex. Apart from this, almost 70 commercial partners work in the network. The system traces the movement of more than 32 thousand products into 94 market outlets on-line. Time will show whether such projects will become large-scale and embrace almost all market participants in several years… Anyway, the level of information technologies’ development in the country is inspiring.
Tatyana Kozlovich
