The air cargo industry is striving for a digital and paperless process to manage the IATA Dangerous Goods Shipper’s Declaration (DGD).
IATA began working on the e-DGD initiative at the end of 2016 with the establishment of the e-DGD Proof of Concept (PoC) Focus Group including three airlines and one ground handler (Air France – KLM Cargo, Lufthansa Cargo, Swiss WorldCargo and Cargologic).
The Focus Group have developed an implementation guide. The goal of this document is to define requirements and provide a guide for data sharing platforms, airlines, shippers, freight forwarders, ground handling agents (GHA) and other stakeholders that want to integrate an e-DGD functionality. The document is based on the learnings from the e-DGD pilot projects during their runtime in 2018.
The standard will be updated continuously to adopt new requirements and integrate further improvements. In terms of standardization, this implementation guide will ensure the consistency of the business processes, define the data flow and validate the XML e-DGD (XSDG) message.
The content of the e-DGD implementation guide is intended to be used as guidance material for stakeholders who wish to implement the use of the e-DGD. This document complements Resolution 618, IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations (DGR) Manual and all of the existing regulations therein remain applicable.
The current version of the IATA e-DGD Implementation Guide can be viewed on the IATA website at the following link:- https://www.iata.org/whatwedo/cargo/dgr/Documents/IATA_eDGD_ImplementationGuide.pdf