zoomIllustration; Image Courtesy: Pixabay under CC0 Creative Commons license

French provider of container tracking solutions Traxens has led the development of the first standards for smart container data exchange published by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT).

“We are proud to pave the way to better data integration and advanced smart container services by bringing the shipping industry together around a common standard,” Mathieu Friedberg, Senior Vice President – Commercial & Agencies Network, CMA CGM Group, said.

“Such standardized solutions are key to advance digitalization and to seize all the opportunities offered by smart containers.”

Although many smart containers are already in use, there are no global standards in place to capture and communicate consistently and multimodally the array of data they generate.

Business Requirements Specifications (BRS) delivers internationally standardized messaging to facilitate the use of smart container data.

Initiated in October 2017, the ‘Smart Containers BRS’ project aims to provide clear global standards for the exchange of data to ensure interoperability and easy integration within different systems. Data will be generated once and shared between multiple stakeholders, platforms and systems, improving data exchange, automated workflow and alert generation, according to Traxens.

As explained, the new standards will be the basis for API development, bringing technology into every aspect of the supply chain and providing innovative tools.

“This technology can be combined with other innovations such as blockchain, big data or data pipelines to provide even more uses in the trading community. In all of these cases, though, we see that creating clear, unambiguous message exchange standards will unlock the further potential of enhanced data,” Jacques Delort, managing director of Traxens, commented.

“Thanks to smart containers standardized messages, the computer representation of the supply chain will become synchronized with the physical world, increasing the speed and accuracy of decision-making, the automation as part of transport and logistics execution and the … collaboration between stakeholders,” Hanane Becha, innovation & standards senior manager at Traxens, said.

“Enhanced data will improve visibility and predictability for stakeholders as well as for regulatory agencies who need detailed information on consignments before they arrive at the border.”

Earlier this year, Danish shipping major Maersk decided to join its counterparts CMA CGM and the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) as a key shareholder and customer of Traxens.

The company agreed in May to invest capital in Traxens, order up to 50,000 Trazens devices and have similar shareholder rights as the two other abovementioned shipping companies.