“Consistently Optimised Resilient Secure Global Supply-Chains”.

Grant agreement no: 603993. Date: 1.5.2014-30.4.2018
http://www.coreproject.eu/

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FP7-project CORE is one of the largest European research and demonstration projects. Around 70 Partners aim to demonstrate that supply chain security and trade facilitation can go hand in hand, building upon proven concepts from previous R&D projects such as CASSANDRA, INTEGRITY, LOGSEC, CONTAIN, EUROSKY and SAFEPOST.

The project is strongly supported by a number of EU-Directorates, particularly, DG-TAXUD (e-Customs and customs risk management policy), DG-HOME (security policy), DG-MOVE (e-freight/e-maritime and land transport security policies) and DG-JRC (scientific support in policy implementation), and is managed by the Research Executive Agency. The daily management of this 4-year project is done by an Executive Committee consisting of the European Shippers’ Council, Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research TNO and BMT Group Ltd. International trade is surrounded by commercial and societal risks. CORE starts from the belief that commercial and societal objectives can be better balanced and even be optimized simultaneously by applying the right innovative concepts.

In order to better cope with the societal risks and challenges, Europe developed ‘rules of the game’, economic operators in trade have to comply to these rules. Control authorities such as customs help shaping, supervising and enforcing them. The development of these set of rules and regulation has evolved in a ‘silo’ approach, resulting in unnecessary and disturbing interventions in the supply chain and high compliance costs for trusted and compliant companies.

Risk management: On the business side, commercial actors along the chain manage the associated commercial risks by a portfolio of transfer, tolerate, terminate and actively treat or mitigate these risks. Many of them have sophisticated strategies so transfer risks and control the most pertinent enterprise risks effectively, but they lack capabilities to seriously consider deploying collaborative chain control measures, despite the fact that it often provides a sound commercial business case to deploy them.

Within CORE, the partners have committed to work together with the objective of maximizing the speed and reliability as well as minimizing the cost of fulfilling global trade transactions, making supply chains more transparent and resilient and bringing security to the highest level. CORE will show how protecting and securing the Global Supply Chain, and reducing its vulnerability to disruption – whether caused by organized criminal groups, by terrorist or other forms of undesirable or illegal activity – can be done while guaranteeing the promotion of a timely and efficient flow of legitimate commerce through the European Union and other nations around the world.

CORE will demonstrate that this can be done while at the same time offering tangible benefits to involved stakeholders – transaction, transport, regulatory and financial operators – thus facilitating its adoption by commercial entities. Within many demonstrators, a challenge is capturing high quality data along the transport chain and enabling data sharing. This would allow businesses along the supply chain to better control their risks and optimize their processes. On the other hand, control agencies like Customs can improve their risk analysis allowing for alternative ways of supervision – and, by doing this, to reduce physical checks.

The four main areas: CORE will address in an integrated and stakeholder-friendly way in four main areas:

1. End-to-end Supply Chain Security fostering standardization, harmonization and mutual recognition;
2. Controlled global visibility of security risks and other supply chain threats and their impact on supply chain flows around the world;
3. Real-time Lean Agile Resilient Green Optimized supply chain solutions offering a highly innovative approach to designing supply chains resilient in real-time to major disturbances caused by high impact events; and
4. New and innovative supervision models for trusted and secure supply chains.

To reach the challenging target, various demonstrations transporting goods with different trade compliance requirements, with different transport modes and from different geographic scopes are included in the project. CORE will focus on demonstrating practical solutions to be implemented within the current legislative framework. Thus, the results also provide input for EU policies or drafting future legislation.

More information at: http://www.coreproject.eu/