Rethinking EU Trade Procedures - The Beer Living Lab

The EU is currently reshaping its customs legislation and practices. Main pillars in the new vision are an intensive use of IT (Customs becomes e-Customs), partnerships between Customs administrations and businesses, and collaboration between national Customs administrations. These concepts should support coping with the dilemma of on the one hand increasing security, safety, financial and health requirements, and on the other hand the need to reduce administrative burden, to keep the EU a competitive economic zone. Two main concepts in coping with this challenge are Single Window and Authorized Economic Operators. The EU is investigating how to transform these abstract concepts into a tangible reality. The Beer Living Lab is an EU-funded pilotconcepts into a tangible reality. The Beer Living Lab is an EU-funded pilot research project that implements this EU vision in the beer industry. In this paper we provide results from the Beer Living Lab and we introduce the fourth step in e-control, a theoretical framework for procedure redesign. We discuss the application of econtrol in the Beer Living Lab, where modeling is a means to facilitate innovation and network transformation.