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Extracts from the minutes of the latest « Partners Meeting » with all EDIMARS participants, late February 1997:

• Transport operators use EDI for operational purposes, not specifically for statistics. Therefore if statistics can be extracted from operational UN-EDIFACT messages then this dramatically reduces the operators’ burden.
• The additional work of data extraction, code conversions and aggregation will then be carried out by a « collection agency » in charge of extracting statistics from operational data transmitted by transport operators. This agency may be a port authority, a port community system, a coordination agency acting on behalf of an administration, or even a transport operator itself.
• Short-term benefits have been identified from different perspectives. These vary from « a significant increase in the efficiency of collecting data for the current statistics on maritime traffic in Germany for all partners involved and a great help for the introduction of the new statistics to fufil the maritime directive » in Germany, to « difficult to estimate costs to date » in UK and Ireland. However, there seems to be a general agreement that long-term benefits are foreseen when processed European data is available from Eurostat for dissemination to administrations, ports and transport operators.

The estimate of the annual cost for a manual statistics collection for a large port authority amounts to 371 000 ECU. The same collection via EDI costs 160 500 ECU, i.e. a savings of 57% per year.

In addition, with the growing usage of the Internet, the cost dedicated to the electronic transmission is getting down, bringing hopes of even higher savings.

In most cases an investment of less than 30 000 ECUs for a PC and an EDIFACT software covers hardware and software costs. Most EDIFACT software may be set-up by the supplier for a very low price.

Getting an operational collection and transmission of statistics costs an average of 55 days for transport operators, port authorities and port community systems. National administrations, when they coordinate the organisation of this collection with all players of the maritime transport statistical collection system, spend an average of 150 days for an operational system.

Based on these figures, the initial investment is estimated to about 60 000 ECU for a declarant and 110 000 ECU for a national administration. However these figures vary greatly depending on the level of computerisation and usage of electronic transmission already in place.