Globally, less than 2% of world trade is carried on electronic bills of lading. This is partly due to lack of open standards and interoperability. To help increase adoption of digital trade documents in shipping, BIMCO has published an electronic bill of lading standard (eBL Standard) for the bulk shipping sector, freely available to any electronic bill of lading solution provider.
The BIMCO eBL Standard is a structured dataset consisting of 20 predefined data fields that are common to bulk shipping bills of lading. Its design is consistent with bills of lading used in the bulk sector and aligned with the UN/CEFACT Multimodal Transport Reference Data Model as well as the containerized and multimodal eBL standards produced by DCSA and FIATA.
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