Preserving Control in Trade Procedure Redesign – The Beer Living Lab

Abstract

Globalization requires the European Union (EU) to reduce the administrative burdens for companies involved in cross‐border trade if the EU is to remain a competitive economic zone. However, increasing efficiency and reducing administrative burden can easily conflict with the growing need for security, safety, health, fraud prevention and control. A key question then is how to ensure that when redesigning procedures for higher efficiency, effectiveness and trade facilitation, the desired control mechanisms are preserved and even improved? The e³‐control methodology is being developed to cope with this challenge, however so far it has been implemented in parts only. In this paper we illustrate a holistic application of e³‐control in the Beer Living Lab (BeerLL), an EU‐funded pilot research project in the beer industry, to address a complex, real‐life inter‐organizational problem. Based on the application of e³‐control in the BeerLL we reflect on: (1) the usefulness of e³‐control to address complex interorganizational real‐life problems; (2) the process of applying e³‐control; (3) the underlying concepts of e³‐control; and (4) the use of Living Labs as a setting for evaluating design artefacts.

Keywords:

• e‐government
• e‐customs
• interorganizational control
• design methodology
• cross‐border trade

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research is part of the integrated project ITAIDE (Nr.027829), funded by the 6th Framework IST Programme of the European Commission (see www.itaide.org). The ideas and opinions expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the views, insights or interests of all ITAIDE partners.

Notes

1. Further information on TREC is available at the following websites accessed on 13 September 2007: http://www.zurich.ibm.com/news/05/trec.html and http://www.research.ibm.com/jam/secure_trade_lane.pdf

2. For details, as accessed on 13 September 2007, see: http://www.epcglobalinc.org

3. The e³‐value tool, as accessed on 13 September 2007, can be downloaded from: http://www.e3value.com/tools/

4. In the context of the BeerLL, we implemented the concept of a Single Window in a narrow sense, i.e., we demonstrate how a trader (e.g., BeerCo) can make information available to the government of one Member State (e.g., the Netherlands) and we do not further investigate how the governments of the different member states collaborate and share that information. A second clarification concerning Single Window and how it was implemented in the BeerLL is related to the way the trader provides information to the authorities. While in the Single Window definition (DG\TAXUD 2006), it is envisaged that the trader actively submits the relevant information to the authorities, in the BeerLL the information is not actively submitted, but it is made available to those authorities with authorized access to that information.