We love to talk about e-Estonia as the most advanced digital society where everything is digital, paperless, borderless, and we hate to wait for someone or somewhere. We love to dream about this but the dirty little secret is that in the 21st century, the field of logistics is still built on paper like it has been for the last 150 years. Nearly everything we consume has to be shipped to us, nearly everything we produce has to be trucked away and if it is urgent, we put it on a plane. The global economy depends on logistics and only in Europe 0,5 million CMR consignment notes for road freight transport are created every day.

Accelerate Estonia is a project where, for the first time, the Estonian government lends a helping hand to solve wicked problems by turning them into new ideas that serve the citizens better and create economic value. It’s a platform for different ministries, the public and the private sector, where experts and leaders join forces and build new innovation. One of the key projects is to simplify the logistics process, create more transparency and make smart logistics as a part of smart Industry or smart trading. Connecting both, private companies and state authorities is the goal in order to create a digital e-logistics ecosystem, an open platform that streamlines the international supply chain and will be an important cornerstone for paperless, real-time multimodal freight transportation. With strong support from the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication, the Accelerate Estonia team had a public presentation at the Tartu Startup Day, held on 30.-31.01.2020.

We have started a pilot project to build shipment’s data exchange over the different business and transport modes. This proof of concept will open up the opportunity to create a transparent model of shipments monitoring and estimating the precise time of arrival in the case where a shipment is carried with multimodal transportation.

At the same time, also another project has been initiated to build a data integration prototype between Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish public authorities. The aim of this is to create readiness for cross-border data sharing between public registres and to use it also for the identification and authorization of the people in each country who are involved in the creation, updating or controlling of the shipment’s (e-CMR) data. These two projects serve the same purpose, and the connection between them is to build parallel data exchange readiness for public cross-border services and international road freight transportation.

Within 6 months will be building the proof of concept and testing the process with a few leading transportation and manufacturing companies, and controlling agencies like Ericsson, DB Schenker, DHL, Tallink, Operail and the Port of Tallinn. The first pilot is targeting to use digitalized e-CMR consignment notes in the corridor from Finland to Poland but there is a long way to go before all the needed data can be exchanged digitally between all expected participants and we can actually make logistics paperless. With the support of smart logistics, Estonia can really be the smart manufacturing Hub, because the logistics partners will be so efficient. We assume that the whole supply chain will be up to 10% more efficient based on modest estimates, and this means 30-40% quicker goods handling compared to the current situation.

Hold tight! Soon the realtime economy will be…real.

In case of deeper interest, please contact me:

Heiti Mering
Accelerate Estonia, e-CMR lead
mobile +372 52 31174