Reducing Information Redundancy for an International Trade Transaction: A Lean Information Management Approach

Abstract

An international trade transaction is a process to transfer products between different countries. This process requires a particular set of procedures and a wide range of documents and paperwork, which involves many organizations from both sides of the two countries. To identify complexity and redundancy in the processes, lean information management is applied. Complexity of flow and redundancy of information in the documents are found. They cause unnecessary costs of time and resources in the transaction process. Ponanan et al. (2019) and Srichanthamit and Suto (2019) have proposed an algorithm to reduce the complexity and information redundancy. In their algorithm, redundant information which can be considered as waste information is decreased. However, the distance, which is one of waste motion, when information is delivered from one organization to another, has not been addressed yet. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed to include this issue when reducing redundant information. The proposed algorithm ensures information conservation of the flow and a decrease of the distance for receiving the information of each organization in the flow. Furthermore, a case of the exporting process between Thailand and Lao PDR is used to show the ability of the proposed algorithm.