A reliable and secure global supply network can only be achieved by tight
cooperation between businesses and government and by making investments that pay
off for public as well as private parties involved in international trade. Businesses
themselves already invest in three ways to realize the goal of achieving reliable and
secure international trade supply chains. These are the achievement of the Authorized
Economic Operator (AEO) status to prove that a business is compliant and
trustworthy, the optimization of logistics and terminal operations by means of
synchro-modality and the realization of sustainable supply chains by means of
visibility and traceability. Synchro-modality concerns the switching between different
forms of transport. The identification of what is happening and went wrong in the
supply chain in case of problems is enabled by real time data visibility and technology
driven traceability.
Next to these investments from private parties, public authorities such as Customs
want to facilitate the market by stipulating that the seller/consignor and the packing
list play a key role in minimizing risks such as safety, security, legal compliance and
commercial risks. Therefore, it is of high relevance to include a Consignment
Completion Point (CCP) as an additional waypoint to the supply chain. This waypoint
is located at the point of container packing or consignment completion and a full set
of accurate data should be provided at this waypoint to be verified between the
seller/consignor and the buyer/consignee. If the full amount of data relating to the
goods and the buyer and seller required by Customs and other regulatory agencies for
an export declaration is provided electronically at the CCP, then this complete and
accurate data can not only bring the seller and buyer together without being dependent
of intermediary logistic service providers but the data can also be used for advanced
risk profiling. A Web-based IT infrastructure that enables the seamless integration of
all data elements from all the different sources in the supply chain at the CCP has
been dubbed as an integrated data pipeline.
Analysing the stakeholders that are concerned with this pipeline has revealed three
key issues. Firstly, as the data pipeline would provide data visibility to all involved
parties, this has to be addressed in order to obtain commitment from freight
46forwarders for the data pipeline, which is a typical example of a market-driven
stakeholder issue. Secondly, the data pipeline has the potential for synchro-modal
logistics but the issue is which party will provide this service. Thirdly, an issue is
whether governments are willing to secure the funding of national data exchange
infrastructures, or whether they require them to become financially more selfsupporting
with new commercial services. These issues should be taken into account
when an integrated data pipeline is realized for creating data visibility to all involved
parties and for achieving reliable and secure international trade supply chains.