SMK-Dagang*Net needs to be re-Classified

Published by The Star (Maritime)

THE 10-year old SMK-Dagang*Net program needs to be re-classified as a high national priority project due to its importance to the nation's trade.

According to the Federation of Malaysian Freight Forwarders (FMFF) president Pauline Tee, this is because the lack of attention given to it has caused many problems, such as the fact that government agencies that provide supporting documents for permit applications are still paper-based, even though the registration and approval processes have already gone electronic.

The FMFF believe that in order to fully tap into the potential of the electronic methods available, a firm effort has to be made to put an end to many of the legacy processes and paper-based supporting documents from other government agencies.

“SMK-Dagang*Net has helped to enhance our trading efficiency tremendously compared to the manual days. The IT literacy in our industry has generally been one of the highest, if not the highest, ever since we started EDI in 1994.

“Nevertheless, there is much to be done to improve the overall efficiency of the trade operations, capitalizing on the virtues of the digital age,” said Pauline.

She said parties who are critical of the program should be making efforts to re-use current knowledge and know-how to better the program and induce improvements to the overall systems instead of just sitting back and making criticisms.

“Among the policies and procedures in need of re-engineering include the introduction of agent profiling and risk management, pre-clearance of shipments, deferred duty payment, automated 'Green Lanes' for golden clients and the adoption of the Single Window Filing for government agencies,” she said.

Tee said as the focal point for the lodging of complaints and problems irrespective of whichever of the many systems are at fault, Dagang Net has borne the brunt of many of the dissatisfactions arising from the complaints faced within the project, and this has had an adverse effect on Dagang Net's image.

She said however, FMFF has pointed out that even though many of the fault alerts are from systems other than their own, Dagang Net has still pledged to invest a further RM11mil in order to achieve their proposed “zero-fault” target and improve their role as the national VAN.

In addition to that, Dagang Net has also held open dialogues with members of the freight fraternity to find ways to improve their service further, she said.