All businesses today are inter-connected, not just by commercial relationships but very often also by electronic communication. This is particularly true in the downstream oil and petrochemical sectors, where decades of outsourcing have led to the point where producers, logistics service providers and customers are linked through automated order placing and delivery planning systems. The sector has long had in place standardised ways of communicating electronically, at least for certain parts of the information chain. In Germany's downstream oil and gas sector, where many companies store their products in independent tank terminals or third-party warehouses and use forwarding agents to transport their products from tank terminal to service station, the exchange of large volumes of information on product loading is vital to keep the supply chain flowing. That data has to move with increasing speed and with reliable quality.
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