Key Design Properties for Shipping Information Pipeline

This paper reports on the use of key design properties for development of a new approach towards a solution for sharing shipping information in the supply chain for international trade. Information exchange in international supply chain is extremely inefficient, rather uncoordinated, based largely on paper, e-mail, phone and text message, and far too costly. This paper explores the design properties for a shared information infrastructure to exchange information between all parties in the supply chain, commercial parties as well as authorities, which is called a Shipping Information Pipeline. The contribution of the paper is to expand previous research with complementary key design properties. The paper starts with a review of existing literature on previous proposed solutions for increased collaboration in the supply chain for international trade, Inter-Organization Systems and Information Infrastructures. The paper argues why the previous attempts are inadequate to address the issues in the domain of international supply chains. Instead, a different set of key design properties are proposed for the Shipping Information Pipeline. The solution has been developed in collaboration with a network of representatives for major stakeholders in international trade, whom evaluate it positively and are willing to invest, develop and test the prototype of the Shipping Information Pipeline.