Posts Tagged ‘advantages’
As Supply, Logistics en Service (SLS) manager, Voestalpine Railpro delivers an integrated total package for the Dutch railway. Railpro operates in the new development-, breakdown- and maintenance market.
The solutions of TIE Kinetix improve the quality of the service and establish cost savings.
“TIE is looking forward to support Voestalpine Railpro with the introduction of Business Integration based on EDI in de railway construction and maintenance sector. EDI is new in this sector and Railpro can build on the knowledge and experience of TIE, obtained in other sectors. With this collaboration, TIE enters a new market, in which many potential customers can profit from the TIE solutions in combination with the GS1 standards.”, says Jan Sundelin, CEO of TIE.
Source: Euronext
Number of Founding Partners EEI Platform approaches the desired twentyfive for 2008. Read More
GlobalSign, one of the longest established Certification Authorities (CA) and specialists in SSL Certificates and Digital Identities for securing PDF documents, has today announced the success of the Antwerp Port Authority project, designed to meet the requirements of Circulaire nr AOIF 16/2008 (E.T.112.081) for the creation and retention of e-invoices. In January 2004 the European Directive on invoicing (EC/115/2001) came into effect with 25 European member states, including Belgium, implementing the directive into their local VAT legislation; the resultant Circulaire was released in Belgium on the 13th May 2008.
Across Europe eVAT rules apply to both the supplier and to the recipient of goods and services. The supplier is obliged to select a technology that guarantees the authenticity and integrity of the e-invoice created – authenticity assures the message content was actually created by the person or legal entity that signed it, and integrity shows that no changes could have been made to the content of the e-invoice during transit without detection. Conversely it is up to the recipient to ensure the e-invoice is stored in such a way as to be assured of the authenticity and integrity during the storage period (7 years in Belgium).
Recognising the advantages of VAT corporate governance through e-invoicing, including reduced paperwork, reduced costs, as well as improved customer relations and greater operational efficiencies, the Port Authority sought a solution that would comply with current legislation. Stakeholders in the project also recognised the need to reduce their carbon footprint across the supply chain and therefore welcomed the initiative.
As an authorised participant in Adobe’s Certified Document Services (CDS) programme, GlobalSign’s DocumentSign solution enables the Port Authority to digitally sign their PDF documents and to embed the trust status of the e-invoice and the creation time for recipients to easily view and store. The solution leveraged the expertise of GlobalSign, Adobe and SafeNet to offer a compelling proposition to the Antwerp Port Authority to meet their e-invoicing requirements.
“We needed a reliable partner to generate added value for our business and for our customers”, said Jan Goossens, Software Development Manager, Antwerp Port Authority. “GlobalSign, with its extensive security expertise and leading technology is the best choice to prove the authenticity of our invoices and bring peace of mind to us and all our customers.”
“We’ve seen a marked increase in the number of projects across the whole of Europe in recent months as the worldwide economic climate causes enterprises both large and small to re-evaluate their invoicing processes to drive down costs and remain competitive,” said Steve Roylance, Business Development Director, GlobalSign. “DocumentSign is not only a cost effective and easy solution for businesses to use, but is also compliant with European e-VAT legislation.” Background on the Antwerp Port Authority The Antwerp Port Authority offers an ideal gateway to Europe with future expansion plans in place to meet the 8% increase on freight year on year through its central European location on the Belgium coast.
Antwerp is currently the second largest port in Europe and the fourth largest in the world with 170 million tonnes of freight volume. More than 200 forwarding companies based in Antwerp help to secure shipping contracts across multiple market sectors including steel, fruit, coffee and tobacco. Numerous stevedoring companies handle more than 16,000 seagoing ships and 65,000 barges annually that call at the port.
Background on the three way partnership for success – GlobalSign, Adobe and SafeNet
In 2003 Adobe Systems Inc took the visionary steps and created a compliant solution known as Certified Document Services (CDS) to address the growing need for document Authenticity and Integrity across multiple markets. The key components of the service leverage core skills from Certification Authorities such as GlobalSign to deliver digital identities to organizations under a defined certificate practice statement including certificate status information and secure time information. SafeNet Luna SA hardware security module (HSM) is used to store digital signatures and protect cryptographic keys. SafeNet HSMs provide reliable protection against compromise for applications and information assets to ensure regulatory compliance, reduce the risk of legal liability, and improve profitability. Both elements are essential to the overall framework of the CDS solution aiding the Port authority to meet the requirements of the directive.
The Spanish Minister for Industry, Tourism and Trade and the Minister for Public Administrations have launched a new training programme aimed at promoting the use of eGovernment services by the citizens of rural areas, so as to break the digital divide.
The initiative is intended to bring the citizens of rural areas closer to all three levels of Government in Spain by enabling them to benefit from the approximately 900 central, regional and local public services available on the eGovernment portal ‘060.es’.
Named ‘Telecentres training and revitalization plan’, the €2 million project relies on the network of Red.es Telecentres; those free Internet access points located across Spain’s rural areas. Over 500 Telecentres trainers will, within 1 500 Telecentres, instruct the population on how to perform operations via the eGovernment portal and to obtain information by electronic means.
In this light, printed and audiovisual information material have been designed in a clear language, with practical examples of the citizens’ daily life aspects, so as to demonstrate the advantages of the portal. In addition, distinct multimedia information packs are being conceived following the specific profiles (youngsters, women, seniors, immigrants, etc) structuring the portal. This material will include information on each target group’s most used services, as well as on the use of the national eID card.
Miguel Sebastián, Minister for Industry, Tourism and Trade stressed that following the successful deployment of Telecentres, his department will concentrate its efforts on the “valorisation of the infrastructure” by adding “services associated to the Telecentres”. He informed that the launch of the ‘Telecentres training and revitalisation plan’ is the first measure in this direction, and that it is based on the Training axis of the Avanza2 programme.
The plan has already started being implemented in 304 Telecentres in the regions of Andalusia and Asturias, with 150 dedicated trainers involved. Later on, the plan will focus on the regions of Castile and León, the Canary Islands and Murcia, and then on Galicia, the Valencian Community, Castile-La Mancha and Extremadura.
Source: Epractice.eu
Dutch Payment specialist RetailPay is the next Founding Partner of the European platform for Electronic Invoicing and invoice automation. Read More
A survey presented at the Swift International Banking Operations Seminar (SIBOS) taking place in Vienna 15 – 19 September shows that European companies are held back from switching to electronic invoicing by complex regulatory compliance requirements and legislation.
The survey found that despite the multiple advantages electronic invoicing offers for business owners – cost-effectiveness and more efficient resource administration among them – 40 percent of European companies currently show no direct interest in performing the switch from paper-based to electronic invoices mainly because their initiatives are hampered by pre-existing regulatory compliance requirements to various country-specific e-invoicing systems. Moreover, over half of the European companies which have subsidiaries and operate their businesses in six or more countries worldwide admit concern regarding the implementation of an e-invoicing system, mainly due to problems arising from the need to comply with multiple national e-invoicing legislations across the globe. Also, a quarter of the survey participants admitted that VAT compliance and auditing requirements – which are an integral part of the invoicing process – are also a problem in the context of dealing with different financial legislations in various countries, each with its own requirements and compliance standards. Therefore, although the benefits of implementing an electronic invoicing system are evident to European business owners, the survey conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne shows that in actuality, e-invoicing implementation is undermined by its dependency on country-specific compliance regulations and by national VAT and tax compliance requirements.
Source: Sterling Commerce
About one month ago, it was distributed a draft of the conclusions of the EC electronic invoice experts regarding future regulation needs to push development and disemination of electronic invoices.
I was disappointed to find that one of the conclusions implies that electronic signature is seen as a barrier for further development of the electronic invoice, and a feature that some of the members of the expert group see as superfluous feature.
In my opinion, electronic documents need ways to reinforce security to allow to tell apart fake documents from authentic documents. Ths is generally true even for informative documents with less impact on companies results.
It is also true that electronic signature is not the only way to reinforce security regarding autenticity of documents. For example, a document can be assumed to be authentic if it is retrieved from a trusted source, even if it is not completed with an electronic signature. But then we must define what are the requirements of such “trusted sources” to keep that assumption.
On the other hand, both approaches, electronic signatures and reference or trusted sources (which in turn frecuently are based in electronic signature derived schemes) need more precise definition to avoid lack of interoperability, which, in my opinion is the real barrier for electronic invoice wide deployment.
Some common authenticity mechanisms are required both for electronic invoices (those that are born electronically from the beginning) and for invoices certified scanning (invoices digital copies that become equivalente to an original, after a security mechanism has been added to a common scanning).
This approach, “certified scanning”, has been initiated in Spain with high success.
Certified scanning is a process in which an electronic signature is applied to a image file while it is scanned from a document paper. This image is stored in a secured database and the main concepts and terms of the paper document are added as metadata to the contextual fields of the image file in the database.
Once a paper document is “certifiedly scanned” the digital copy becomes equivalente to an original, and the paper source can be destroyed. The new “electronic original” can then be used for auditing purposes.
For the companies that receive thousands of invoices, “certified scanning” adoption imply benefiting from most of the advantages of the electronic invoice without dealing with the slow adoption pace that their suppliers could show.
If we want to support “certified scanning” we need a common definition of the requirements for that conversion. And they should not be very different form the requirements for “electronic invoices” .
If we accept authenticity mechanisms not based in electronic signature, they should be common for both approaches. And if electronic signature is still to be used in the future as the authenticity mechanism of the electronic invoice, the broad options in variants should be reduced and clearly defined (in my opinion, the XL definition of CAdES -TS 101 733- or XAdES -TS 101 903- should be used, including both validation and timestamping, from the signer side).
Source: ePractice
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