The current release provides draft documents, a documentation website, and a local Python exchange prototype. Moving to an operational network requires evidence from all three trade flows, accountable participants, supported integrations, and agreed trust rules. A demonstration with synthetic data does not establish readiness for live trade.
Understand the current processes
Select real import, export, and interprovincial journeys with willing participants. Across them, include ship, rail, truck, port, terminal, and warehouse handoffs. Identify which documents and facts move, who enters them, who relies on them, and which system is authoritative.
Record fax, email, PDF, portal, EDI, and manual re-entry practices rather than assuming the same problem exists everywhere. Measure effort and delay, identify unnecessary steps, and establish why information is repeated. The discovery deliverable is a current-state map and a prioritized list of changes with named owners.
Agree the profiles and responsibilities
Develop the required commercial, transport, event, and regulatory profiles. Validate international mappings and select actual partner interface versions. Specify permissions, provenance, corrections, retention, exception ownership, and the difference between an exchange receipt and an official decision.
Establish the sponsor, governance process, operator, funding, participation terms, and support responsibilities. Agree what a shared service may retain and how an organization can leave. Legal acceptance must be evaluated for the specific document, activity, and jurisdiction.
Connect independent implementations
Exchange messages between independently implemented connectors. Include an organization using legacy EDI and a smaller firm without an integration team. Confirm that required information is reused without silent truncation, unit conversion, or status changes.
Government integration requires the receiving agency's actual access and testing process. Mock responses must remain visibly separate from real responses. Before live use, confirm security controls and operational support beyond the prototype's local API-key model.
Validate operations and exceptions
Test successful handoffs and failures. Required cases should include split and consolidated loads, conflicting reports, a missing document, an incorrect identifier, a rejected submission, duplicate messages, out-of-order events, expired access, and an unavailable endpoint.
For each exception, identify the responsible organization, the evidence required, and the resolution path. Recovery should preserve evidence and prevent an obsolete record from appearing current. Test restoration and replay rather than assuming a successful database write proves resilience.
Measure benefits before expansion
| Measure | What to establish |
|---|---|
| Repeated entry and manual effort | Count the same fact entered again and time spent per transaction. |
| Data quality | Measure rejected submissions, corrections, and unresolved identifier conflicts. |
| Information delay | Measure elapsed time from the real event to an authorized recipient's usable record. |
| Handoff delay | Separate information problems from capacity or physical operational constraints. |
| Adoption and operations | Measure onboarding effort, ongoing participant cost, recovery, and support demand. |
Define each measure and baseline per journey, then agree targets. Expand only when the operational owners understand the results, unresolved defects, service cost, and remaining risks.
Prototype gaps
Federated endpoints, verified organization onboarding, delegated roles, field-level policies, automated expiry, document signatures, subscriptions, external EDI and government connectors, distributed delivery, and production recovery remain future work. The current profile also needs richer goods, order, invoice, and document relationships before it can represent the full commercial chain.
Propose changes through a repository issue or pull request with the affected use case, compatibility impact, examples, and validation evidence. See draft conventions and trust and governance.
Copyright © 2026 Stephen Makonin.