In the context of increase in international trade, the modern global supply chain must be efficiency-driven while being more and more constrained by security and traceability issues. Required trade, transport and regulatory documentation are still often decentralized and paper-based. The misalignment between the requirements from the global trade economy and the national and European regulatory constraints is an increasing burden for economic actors and government agencies.
Based on this observation, the Council of Government of Luxembourg has decided on 25 April 2014 to set up a single window for logistics and international trade. This integrated solution, implemented by the Luxembourg Government, is developed around 4 main lines:
- Transaction: digitize current administrative procedures in order to enable economic operators to do their administrative formalities related to logistics operations online and paperless
- Information: provide information about necessary documents to import, export and circulate goods through Luxembourg
- Help-desk: offer personalized support to economic operators who want to carry out their administrative formalities or develop their activities in Luxembourg
- Coordination: orchestrate the activities between involved government agencies, as well as between those agencies and the logistics service providers
A Single Window (SW) is defined by UNECE as a facility that allows parties involved in trade and transport to lodge standardized information and documents with a single entry point to fulfill all import, export, and transit-related regulatory requirements. In a Single Window, if information is electronic, then then individual data elements should only be submitted once.
The Single Window programme in Luxembourg currently aims at building a consistent ecosystem encompassing the following projects:
- Luxembourg information portal on logistics and international trade
- single entry to the state that will be implemented by the Customs and Excise Administration and the CTIE as part of the new customs IT platform LUCCS (Luxembourg Customs Clearance System)
- front and back-end solutions offering online administrative procedures (MyGuichet.lu)
- Cargo Community Platform.
The Single Window benefits to both economic operators and government agencies.
