- Print Friendly - Help

Overview of Animal Products E-cert

Background

Animal Products E-cert is the MAF Internet application for assisting Government to Government assurances about the compliance of New Zealand’s meat and seafood products with regulatory requirements. Its purpose is to track the market eligibility and product status from the time of production until export and the approving of an Export certificate. It produces a paper certificate and/or electronically advises the international agency. The Export Certificate is supported by an extensive collection of approved electronic internal transfer documents which track the approval of each product when it moves from one premises to another. These are called Eligibility Documents.

E-cert was originally initiated between MAF and the meat industry, with the seafood industry coming in later. A variety of factors combined to enable industry representatives and MAF to explore different ways of providing electronic certificates. These factors included:

• Ways to reduce the likelihood of fraud. Paper certificates can be fraudulently used and providing international agencies with the means to validate paper certificates significantly increases the likelihood that they will be detected. In addition, the full electronic approach would mean that paper certificates would not be created and the ability to create fraudulent certificates would be significantly reduced. Products using fraud certificates may not comply with New Zealand’s standards and therefore bring
• Responding to international trends and request to use electronic rather than paper exchanges.
• Reducing the total cost of certification and the error rate
• The ability to rapidly respond to increasingly changing market requirements
• Increased rigour and validation of New Zealand’s quality produce

The original thinking about an E-cert type application started in 1992. This was based upon the EDIFACT model. The EDIFACT model was the United Nations EDIFACT protocol for electronic commerce. The initial developments were the development of MAF internal systems which would support the E-cert data requirements. This includes development of a database for MAF contacts and organisations and recording authorisations, premises and their licenses. By 1996 these internal systems were being used and the scoping was being undertaken for an E-cert application.

A number of threads combined during this period to decide on the future E-cert model. This included analysis of visits to other jurisdictions, an analysis of the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) versus the emerging Internet approach, and the increasing awareness of the impact of the recently published MAF website. The proposal for an electronic certification Internet based system was formally initiated in April 1997.

From there the development of the Animal Products Electronic Certification application commenced. The first version available for people to preview was available in May 1999. By August 1999 the application was available for authorised people to generate Eligibility Documents. A Disaster Recovery system was installed by January 2000. By 3 April 2000 it was mandatory for the meat industry to use E-cert for the creation of all Eligibility Documents.

By March 2001 the following had been achieved:

• Electronic eligibility documents for the meat industry implemented for over twelve months
• E-cert being used by about 800 people per day
• E-cert use being demonstrated through:
• • about browser 80,000 requests per day
  • an increasing number eligibility documents generated each month, with a new peak of 28,500 in March 2001. About 1500 of these were seafood documents
  • about 250,000 eligibility documents stored in the system
• Independent evidence that E-cert is about 30% faster than the average of the top 20 New Zealand sites
• A Disaster Recovery regime in place and proven to work effectively
• The E-cert system being available between 99.27 and 100% of the time between August and March 2001. The Service Level Agreement is for 99.5% availability
• New more powerful servers implemented March 2001 to accommodate increased requirements
• Discussions actively taking place with international jurisdictions on their accessing E-cert and obtaining electronic documents
• An equivalent Dairy Export Certification regime development on target for release in mid 2001
• Discussions progressing with other MAF export regulatory regimes for them to use the E-cert approach.

E-cert Impact

The Meat and Seafood industries are a $NZ4,000,000,000 per year export industry. This is about 20% of the New Zealand export economy. E-cert supports the decisions for determining the quality of New Zealand produce and has a major impact upon people’s work if it is not available.

E-cert is an integral and critical part of the process for exporting meat and seafood products. This is through:

• Providing the primary means for creating and storing Eligibility Documents and Export Certificates
• Providing the primary means for recording the approval of product for transfer
• Increasing the quality and integrity of information from which to make decisions

How E-cert is Used

The core component of the application is the tracking and recording of meat and seafood products between licensed premises and international borders.

As can be seen from the Business Process diagram, E-cert is integral to the certification business process.

An authorised company user accesses E-cert over the Internet to input the required data. This can be undertaken in a variety of ways – single certificate at a time (online data entry access), multiple certificates at one time (online batch file), or a company system automatically sending data to E-cert (batch file by ftp).

Once the document is submitted, an e-mail (if requested by the Inspector) is sent to the appropriate MAF Verification Agency Inspector to advise that the new document has been received and is ready for their decision. The Inspector then accesses E-cert and decides on the outcome of the request based upon their knowledge of the premises and the content of the certificate. These steps are repeated with each transfer of product as a product is not allowed to be transferred before approval is given where the meat is for human consumption. Products from some documents may be combined with other products to create a new document. This could be repeated many times. E-cert provides a means to track through the history of product.

When the product is ready for export, an export certificate is created which is either printed and signed to go with the product, and/or electronically sent to the country of destination. The international authority can then access E-cert to validate the data and affirm that the certificate received is correct. An Export Certificate can have one or hundreds of approved Eligibility Documents supporting the decision that the product meets the importing country’s quality assurance requirements.

Further Information

If you require further information please send an e-mail outlining your contact details and request to:

ecert-admin@maf.govt.nz

Related Links

• Application Form for Access to Animal Products E-cert
• Help & Tutorials