CEF Building Blocks Presented at Danube Ports in the Digital Age: Challenges & Opportunities
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On 11 April 2019, the European Commission presented the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Blocks at the event Danube Ports in the Digital Age: Challenges & Opportunities in Vienna, Austria.
The digitalisation of Danube ports’ businesses processes affects various aspects of a port's administration and organisation. In maritime transport, actors increasingly submit, manage and store notifications, declarations, certifications, requests and service orders in electronic, rather than paper, format. Digitalisation also means facilitating the recognition of professional qualifications in inland navigation through information systems, or supporting vessel tracking & tracing. Nevertheless, close to 99% of freight transport operations within the EU still use paper documents. This translates to 380 million hours in total spent processing paper based transport information (total EU, 2018 estimate).
In this context, the Danube Ports Network organised this conference to address what digital means for Danube port administrators and operators and their core business. Danube Ports Network Secretary General Manfred Seitz and Dr. Michael Prohaska, CEO “the team” GmbH, opened and moderated the event, highlighting that ports in the Danube region need to overcome “digital inertia”, build confidence and expertise in the Danube Region – from the Black Sea area to the Danube river/corridor – by debating and exploring key concepts, sharing lessons & experiences of digitalisation in practice.
The conference highlighted current EU policies, legislative initiatives and funding opportunities to support sea & inland ports digitalisation. The event also showcased how first-movers have responded to the digital challenge and driven the needed change at port organisation and port community level.
During the day, Mr Thomas Fillis, from the Commission's CEF Building Blocks team, presented the Building Blocks and outlined now Danube ports stand to gain by reusing them. The CEF Building Blocks (Context Broker, eArchiving, eDelivery, eID, eInvoicing, eSignature, Big Data Test Infrastructure and eTranslation) are set of generic and reusable Digital Service Infrastructures (DSI), facilitating the delivery of digital public services across borders and sectors.
Mr. Rui Barros, Chief executive officer MITMYNID and manager of the e-Freight Implementation Action (e-Impact) project, took this even further. Mr Barros highlighted how the reuse of CEF eDelivery reduced the cost of exchanging information between different actors and transport modes along the chain, leading to a more efficient, less polluting freight transport.
Rui Barros, MITMYNID & Thomas Fillis, DIGIT
Download the presentation or visit CEF Digital to see how the CEF Building Blocks can support digital transformation in your organisation.