New digital ECTA Best Practice Guidelines
The ECTA digital workgroup is pride to announce 2 new digital ECTA Best Practice Guidelines.
A first guideline addresses Transport Order data standards in Bulk Chemicals; the second guideline describes the Equipment master data standards for bulk and packed in Chemical Logistics.
The value and importance of data exchanges across different chemical logistics actors is growing year and year, together with the need to establish standardized data formats and common definitions.
Transport Order data standards in Bulk Chemicals
In line with the already published digital ECTA best practice guideline on transport visibility within bulk chemicals, the ECTA digital workgroup is pride to announce its first ECTA Best Practice Guideline to exchange Transport Order data standards.
Today, many different electronic data sets are being exchanged between shippers and carriers leading to extra complexity, process inefficiencies and incorrectly fulfilled customer orders. The objective of this new ECTA guideline is to give the involved stakeholders additional guidance how to exchange transport order information in a standard way and this to further enhance the digital adoption rate and improve the interoperability.
The guideline starts by explaining the challenges of exchanging transport order data. Next, it describes the typical transport order message flows while referring to a very practical example message. The full ECTA best practice guideline on transport order data exchanges can be read here.
Equipment master data standards for bulk and packed in Chemical Logistics
Furthermore, the ECTA digital workgroup addressed the topic of more structured Equipment master data. To bring chemical logistics to the next level in terms of safety, quality and sustainability, the digital exchange of more standardized and structured logistics equipment master data is also gaining in importance and momentum.
Today, checks of equipment data is done through human paper exchanges and/or physical paper checklists at the gates. In future, such repetitive exchange of the standard equipment reference data will be done pro-actively and digitally. Besides, companies look at new ways to enable faultless compliance with equipment data and this to comply with transport and dangerous goods regulations.
This new digital ECTA Best Practice Guideline on Equipment master data , aims to create a simple, structured and standard equipment master data framework based upon 3 practical Use Cases. Within each equipment master data Use Case, the required data fields, the actor(s) and the “value added” purpose is explained to share a specific equipment data subset. Besides, the guideline makes some practical implementation reflections, opportunities and challenges as the authors of the workgroup observed them today.
The ECTA best practice guideline on equipment master data together with the Use Case driven equipment master data exchange framework can be consulted here.
Thank you
ECTA wants to especially thank the ECTA digital workgroup and all stakeholders for their inputs and hard work to make this publication happen. For questions or more info, please contact one of the ECTA workgroup members, peter.devos@ecta.com or send an email to info@ecta.com.