A Regional Workshop organized by the WCO on the WCO Data Model (DM) was held from 10 to 11 June 2019 in Baku, Azerbaijan. The Workshop was hosted by the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan, with financial support from the Customs Cooperation Fund (CCF) Japan, and took place back-to-back with the WCO IT/TI Conference running from 12-14 June 2019. In his opening remarks to the Workshop, Mr. Iqbal Babayev, Deputy Chairman of the State Customs Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan thanked the WCO, and said that fast, reliable data flows within supply chains were important to ensure the efficiency of supply chain processes, specifically in the cross-border regulatory environment. He added that the WCO Data Model helped ensure that the exchange of information in supply chains took place in a harmonized way. Mrs. Milena Budimirovic, Acting Deputy Director of Procedure and Facilitation of the WCO, welcomed participants and underscored the importance of harmonized exchange of information based on international standard to enable SMART borders management.

Participating in the Workshop were the WCO Member administrations of North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Serbia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Israel, and the United Kingdom, as well as the host country, Azerbaijan.

The WCO representative and WCO expert from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) facilitated the Workshop, underscoring that information exchange was fundamental in enabling different Customs modernization initiatives, such as Single Window, e-commerce, risk management, coordinated border management, pre-arrival/pre-loading risk assessment, and Globally Networked Customs (GNC). The availability of reliable data was therefore a key component of SMART borders management. The WCO representative introduced the WCO Recommendation on the use of the WCO Data Model, pointing out that adoption of the DM involved creating a “My Information Package” (i.e. a subset of the WCO Data Model for a specific purpose).

The WCO expert invited participants to go through all the WCO DM components (the WCO DM Library and DM Information Packages). Participants were also told about the main WCO DM structures in the context of cargo reporting, goods declarations and conveyance reporting.

The Workshop included a practical exercise in which participants were invited to digitize the CBSA paper-based cargo report form and use it to create a WCO DM information package.

Workshop participants shared their experience on a number of border modernization case studies where data harmonization and standardization played an important role. The United Kingdom spoke about its Pre-Load Data Informed Cargo Targeting programme (“PreDICT”), while Azerbaijan Customs described the exchange of government-to-government (“G2G”) pre-arrival information with the Customs administrations of neighbouring countries.