CWA 14746:2003

Electronic commerce: a case study of the footwear industry in Europe CWA 14746:2003

Scope

The present document gives guidance to the developers of e-commerce system to be used by any trading
partner in the shoe manufacturing industry and the corresponding distribution activity.
Having been originally designed in order to satisfy the priority goal of the EFNET 2 program, parts of this
CWA have deliberately limited ambitions. This is in particular the case of the content of the e-business
documents and of the Communication protocols. However, this CWA contains the corresponding
recommendations which can be used to get started and to acquire experience in e-trading without imposing
major modifications to the users (manufacturers, retailers, buying groups etc..
The corresponding CWA are said to be Informative CWA.
Being conscious of that situation, the EFNET 2 experts have endeavoured to deliver to the FINEC Workshop
more ambitious guidance and indications which pave the way for future developments, not constrained by the
limitations of the existing implementations made by the legacy national systems.
This CWA contains an overview of reduced and extended XML schemas developed by EFNET 2 and
discussed by footwear associations in the FINEC Workshop. It contains recommendations which have a real
economic value, as they are based on the in depth analysis of users’ needs.
They are still some problems to overcome. The EFNET extended schemas are still not EAN-UCC compliant.
The long standing policy of the European shoe traders consists in working in good understanding with EANUCC,
to reach a solution on ecommerce for the footwear industry accepted globally and not only on
European scale. The European Footwear Associations (Manufacturers and Retailers) therefore have asked
to further develop the schemas in order to reach compliance with EAN-UCC rules.