The foundation that maintains the open eCMR standard behind eFTI Connect has welcomed bitsEverywhere as its first member company from Serbia. Here is why we joined, and what it does and does not mean for you.
On 9 July 2026 the Open Logistics Foundation announced that bitsEverywhere d.o.o. — the company that builds eFTI Connect — had joined as a member. We are its first member company from Serbia.
The Foundation's welcome was generous: they wrote that they look forward to "shaping the future of logistics together". We are glad to be there. But the more useful thing to write about is why we joined, and what it does — and does not — mean for the companies that use our platform.
What the Open Logistics Foundation is
The Open Logistics Foundation is a European non-profit foundation. It exists so that logistics companies and software makers can build shared, open-source components and standards together, instead of each building the same thing behind its own walls. Its members are logistics operators, software companies and research institutions from across Europe — Rhenus, Dachser, Blue Yonder and Markant among them.
One of the things the Foundation maintains is the open eCMR standard: the common data model for the electronic consignment note, advanced, tested and validated by 28 member companies and presented at transport logistic 2025 in Munich in June 2025. eFTI Connect is built on that standard, and has been from the first line of code.
Why we joined
When we started building eFTI Connect, we faced the choice every platform in this field faces: invent our own format for the electronic consignment note, or adopt the one the industry is converging on.
As our founder Željko Bajšanski put it in the Foundation's announcement, with our eCMR platform we did not want to reinvent the wheel, so we are building it to be fully compatible with the Open Logistics Foundation.
That is not idealism, it is arithmetic. A consignment note has at least three parties — sender, carrier, consignee — and often a fourth one at the border. A document format that only a single platform can read is not really a document. The entire value of an eCMR appears at the moment somebody else can open it, verify its seal and act on it, without an account on your system and without a phone call to your dispatcher.
Joining the Foundation was the consistent next step: it lets us build on shared, proven standards and contribute back to a community that moves the whole logistics industry forward, rather than only drawing from it.
What this means for you — and what it does not
Let us be precise, because this is exactly the kind of claim our industry likes to overstate.
Membership is not a certification. The Foundation has not reviewed, tested, approved or endorsed eFTI Connect, and we will never suggest otherwise. Membership means our company is part of the community that develops the standard. By itself it says nothing about our product.
What membership is, day to day, is a standing commitment. We work inside two of the Foundation's working groups — Electronic Transport Documents and Track & Trace — and on its eCMR, eDeliveryNote and Timeslot Management projects. That means weekly meetings with people from logistics and software companies across Europe, working real operational problems through together rather than discussing the standard in the abstract.
For you, it comes down to four things:
- Compatibility is maintained upstream. We follow the eCMR data model where it is written — in the Foundation's Electronic Transport Documents Work Group — instead of reverse-engineering it from the outside, after the fact.
- Changes reach us while they are still drafts. When the standard moves, we see it coming. That is time your platform does not have to spend catching up later.
- Your documents are not locked in our system. An eCMR created in eFTI Connect follows an open, published model. Exchanging it with partners on other compatible platforms is a property of the standard, not a favour any vendor grants you.
- The region gets a voice. The eCMR standard was shaped largely in Western Europe. The routes our customers actually drive — Serbia to Hungary, Bosnia to Croatia, North Macedonia to Greece — have their own border realities and their own paperwork habits. Being in the room is the only way those get raised at all.
What comes next
The timing was a coincidence, but a fitting one. The announcement came in the same month that Serbia ratified the 2008 e-CMR Protocol, which makes the electronic consignment note legally equivalent to paper on international routes where the other country has ratified it too. And it came exactly one year before 9 July 2027 — the date from which authorities across the EU must accept freight transport information submitted electronically under the eFTI Regulation (2020/1056).
Carriers in this region will meet that date whether they prepared for it or not. Our work between now and then is to make sure they meet it comfortably.
We intend to earn the membership rather than display it: by contributing back what we learn on the Western Balkans corridors, and by keeping eFTI Connect honest to the standard as it evolves.
The Foundation's full member list is published at openlogisticsfoundation.org, and the announcement itself is on the Foundation's LinkedIn page.
Move freight, not papers.
Photo: Open Logistics Foundation
