Glossary
Columbus Electronic Freight Management
CEFM was a deployment test within the Electronic Freight
Management program which implemented all the components of the
EFM necessary to support a select Limited Brands (a US-based
apparel shipper) international truck-air-truck supply chain.
The successful test ran from June through December 2007 and
involved 871 shipments.
Consignment
A separately identifiable amount of goods items (available to
be) transported from one consignor to one consignee via one or
more than one mode of transport and specified in one single
transport contract document. A Uniform Consignment Reference
number (UCR) was created in the CEFM deployment test and used
successfully to identify consignments and relate them to freight
bills.
Electronic Freight Management
EFM is a U.S. Department of Transportation R&D program initiated
in 2006 that promotes and evaluates innovative e-business
concepts, enabling process coordination and information sharing
for supply chain freight partners through public-private
collaboration.
EFM Operator
The organization that operates the EFM technology components and
helps partners connect. In the CEFM test, Battelle Memorial
Institute operated the components on behalf of The Limited
Brands and its partners.
Freight
Any commodity transported. Synonymous with “Goods”.
Freight Information Highway
FIH is an innovative, non-proprietary standards-based
architectural specification that defines a service-oriented
architecture to support business process coordination and secure
real-time data exchange. FIH utilizes standard processes,
schemas, and definitions that are specific to the freight
transportation industry. While FIH was separately developed and
tested by DOT in 2001-2004, the EFM program has used and refined
FIH components. For purposes of clarity, these web pages and
the referenced documents use EFM, the successor DOT program, to
represent the web-services and SOA components that originated in
FIH.
Multimodal transport
The carriage of goods by at least two different modes of
transport. In contrast, intermodal transport implies the change
from one mode to another using the same form of loading unit.
Multimodal transport implies that either there is more than one
modal shift, or that loads may be broken into partial loads as
part of a modal change.
Service Oriented Architecture
An application architecture in which all functions, or services,
are defined using a description language and have invokable
interfaces that are called to perform business processes.
Shipment
An identifiable collection of one or more goods items (available
to be) transported together from the original shipper, to the
ultimate consignee. Note: A shipment can be transported in
different consignments.
Small / Medium Enterprise (SME)
For EFM, a SME is defined as a commercial organization of
limited revenues or numbers of employees. Very often an SME
lacks the owned, leased or contracted availability of
information technology infrastructure beyond a simple computer
with a web browser and access to the internet. Such
organizations can participate in EFM and may benefit more from
the data exchange improvements than a large sized organization
that is more likely to have sophisticated IT resources (See the
tab, “For Small Enterprises” on this web site).
Supply Chain Partner
The organization that transacts information along a supply chain
or in a region that has deployed EFM. Examples are freight
forwarders, carriers, manufacturers, and customs brokers.
Web services
Describes a standardized way of integrating Web-based
applications using XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over
an Internet protocol backbone. In CEFM 21 web services were
successfully used and are now available at no cost.
