ECTA digital data standards
the cornerstone towards seamless digital collaboration
Since 2019, the ECTA digitalization workgroup has been publishing 7 ECTA digital best practice guidelines all including new industry standards to simplify and improve the implementation of digital projects between the different supply chain actors.
In June 2023, the ECTA visibility guideline, with its standardized ETA milestone dates, was used as basis to issue the ITCO deep sea visibility guideline for ISO tank container shipments and this with close support of the ECTA digitalization workgroup. The ITCO guideline about deep sea transport visibility can be consulted here and is a very nice example to create digital visibility standards across all transport modes.
ecta digitalization webinars
Besides, this year, two ECTA digital webinars were organized explaining the latest status on supply chain visibility and e-freight (eCMR and eECD) documents.
During the last webinar in October, practical use case experiences of Shell, Den Hartogh, BASF and ECLIC have been shared with more than 220 webinar participants. The webinar speakers demonstrated how controlled data sharing and the use of digital standards can create new efficiencies along the chemical logistics chain. Even though, the e-document usage rates are still below 1% today, it’s clear that logistics paper documents are not the future and both national and EU regulators will force companies to gradually work more with electronic freight documents where the focus is to share standardized data sets and no longer paper or pdf documents.
In that respect, also the SQAS 2024 revision is planned to include the usage of electronic freight documents.
Next year, on January 16, the ECTA digitalization workgroup will organize its third digital webinar addressing the equipment, truck and truck driver data standards and best practice guidelines. Also here, there is an opportunity to exchange more data using common digital industry standards to reduce waiting time at gate check-ins, to allow automatic equipment checks prior loading and to improve site and yard management security. An invite to this webinar is planned to be sent out mid-December via our Newsletter.