Easing modern trade flow requires improvements in the entire supply chain, including commercial and border management. Key to managing these new demands and making optimum choices is to capture and use the right data at the right time from the right source. In this aim, a number of pilot projects have developed an end to end data carrier that describes the data to be sent to regulatory authorities through a “seamless integrated transaction.” This process has necessitated a major rationalisation of current business requirements and approaches in order to ensure capturing the accurate data at its source.
In today’s business processes in global supply chains, information about transactions resides in fragmented business and government systems. As a result, the flow of goods is accompanied by information streams of poor quality. The lack of reliable, accurate and complete data makes it hard to achieve supply chain visibility. This, in turn, makes decision making, risk detection, efficient risk management, supply chain optimization by companies and supervision by border inspection agencies very difficult.
Connectivity infrastructures for information sharing such as data pipelines enable better quality of data, supply chain visibility and information sharing. They open new possibilities for system-based audit and the development of smart software applications to offer value added services to business such as automated planning and scheduling and for border agencies such as automated monitoring and targeting.
In such a pipeline approach, the quantity of data in the pipeline therefore grows as the goods move from seller and shipper to consignee and buyer. These pipelines will need to have a sequence of generic milestones but these will be individually constructed based on customer needs; so each one may be different. | 
