The Italian stakeholder meeting was held in La Spezia on the 24th of January. The meeting has been opened by the President of La Spezia Port Authority, Mr Lorenzo Forcieri, and the Widermos project coordinator, Federica Montaresi. The President of La Spezia Port Authority has welcomed the participants, explaining the importance of WiderMos project for the port community in La Spezia and for logistic operators linked to the port of La Spezia . Federica Montaresi stressed on the opportunities that events like the WiderMos workshop and stakeholder meeting could offer to business community specifically for maritime, logistic and transport operators in order to understand how to improve the operations and the services they offer to their customers.

More than 40 people attended the meeting, italian partners and stakeholders coming from inland terminal, modal transport operators, terminal operators, shipping lines, big shippers, Italian custom agency, phitosanitary office of the port of La Spezia, railways undertaking.

The WiderMos project has been then presented in detail by Federica Montaresi the project coordinator from the Port Authority of La Spezia and by Alexio Picco from Circle as the technical manager of the project.

The open discussion after the presentation of the project has been very useful.

The meeting firstly highlight that the proper freight flow range extension from La Spezia is Switzerland, West and East Germany. La Spezia - Basel and La Spezia - Karlsruhe services face many Customs related issues and Port to hinterland connections related issues. Furthermore, more expenses and higher costs are relevant due to infrastructure limits (Italy composition of trains of 1000 tonn while Germany 2000 tonn.). If we consider barges we have prices 1/4 of Italian fares (e.g. from Rotterdam). That's why of La Spezia - Basel and La Spezia - Karlsruhe in order to ensure competitive prices.

Efficiency and operations are already at good level between La Spezia and Melzo (Milan) operated by Sogemar. There is an important issue related to the shunting operations in the inland terminal and how to improve it. The need is the data integration between RFI (italian railway undertaking and the inland terminal system.

During the meeting several needs have been addressed:

• There are many electronic logistics platforms at regional, national, international and global levels but they need to be interoperable. New developments under the Single Window concept are not required but interoperability is a real need. Small and medium transport operator companies must have access to these facilities.

• In terms of operability, data format standards and information exchange protocols must meet the end user requirements efficiently and at low cost. These opinions will help to define a real and viable Single Window System conceived as Corridor Management Platform accessible and user friendly, reducing duplicity in data input and time consumption.

• The different information collected on each point of the logistic chain must feed the platform efficiently and smartly in automatic way. The multimodal transport operators will offer better services and will improve benefits reducing costs and becoming more competitive.

• The common platform must cover all of the transport modes and may especially develop the Rail Transport procedures to be introduced on the existing Single Windows in customs, sea, port, terminal and land transport legs in the logistic chain.

• Some custom topics have been addressed during the meeting , specially the clearance operation and the pre -clearing. One of the most important requirement is the simplification of custom procedures that doesn't mean no control or less control but more efficient controls on goods.