At a glance

• Seven contracts across five years (December 2020 – December 2025) — and a working relationship that continues today — with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) TIR secretariat in Geneva, the body behind the TIR customs-transit system used across 77 countries.
• We developed the original version of the eTIR National Application — the Java/Spring Boot and React application UNECE provides to customs authorities free of charge — in close collaboration with the TIR secretariat, taking it through the official eTIR conformance tests and into production.
• Released as open source under Apache 2.0 in October 2025, and presented at UN Open Source Week 2026 in New York as one of the first UN-developed open-source Digital Public Goods.
• Ten countries are now interconnected with the eTIR international system, directly or via the National Application, and the first live cross-border eTIR transports ran between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in May 2026.
• Along the way: modernising ITDB, the international registry of 30,000+ authorised transport operators and 2,700+ approved customs offices, and implementing the portal through which transport operators submit their TIR data.

The client

The TIR Convention is one of the quiet workhorses of world trade. Administered by UNECE in Geneva, it lets a sealed truck cross multiple borders under a single, internationally recognised customs guarantee — no repeated inspections, no re-lodging declarations at every frontier. Seventy-seven countries operate it, historically on a paper document: the TIR carnet.

The UNECE TIR secretariat runs the digital infrastructure replacing that paper: the eTIR international system, which exchanges transit and guarantee data between national customs systems, and ITDB, the International TIR Data Bank — the reference registry of more than 30,000 authorised transport operators and some 2,700 approved customs offices that every eTIR transaction relies on. In his March 2020 COVID-19 report, the UN Secretary-General urged that “innovative tools such as UN eTIR/eCMR systems… that allow the exchange of electronic information without physical contact” should be used to keep goods moving across borders.

Tucanoo’s founder, David Brown, was engaged by the TIR secretariat as an independent consultant in December 2020 — the start of seven contracts over five years and a working relationship that continues today, with ongoing ad-hoc support for the secretariat’s systems.

The challenge

Digitalising a 77-country paper system is not one problem but a chain of them.

• ITDB needed modernising without downtime. The registry underpinning the whole eTIR system was running on an ageing Grails framework and needed migrating — live, with customs administrations and national associations using it around the clock.
• Transport operators needed a way in. The eTIR procedure depends on operators submitting advance transport data electronically, which meant a new public-facing portal.
• Most of all, countries needed a realistic path to connect. The eTIR procedure’s legal basis (Annex 11 to the Convention) entered into force in May 2021, but a country can only operate it once its customs systems are interconnected with the eTIR international system. UNECE’s experience with the first five countries showed a direct interconnection project took around eleven months, plus funding and outside experts — at that rate, connecting all contracting parties would take many years.

The approach

The engagement grew phase by phase, each contract building on the last.

Phase 1 — ITDB modernisation (2020–2021). We migrated ITDB across two major framework versions and brought every controller in the application under unit test, verifying the migrated system against the secretariat’s extensive role-based regression scenarios and JMeter performance test plans. A live intergovernmental registry, modernised without disrupting the administrations that depend on it.

Phase 2 — The operator portal and eCMR (2021–2022). We implemented the web portal through which private transport operators submit their TIR transport data, using React and Spring Boot on PostgreSQL, and built a proof of concept for the eCMR — the electronic version of the international road consignment note.

Phase 3 — The eTIR National Application (2023). The centrepiece. Rather than every country running its own eleven-month integration project, the TIR secretariat conceived a ready-made application any customs authority could deploy — and engaged us to develop its original version, in close collaboration with the secretariat’s team in Geneva: a Java 17 / Spring Boot secured REST back end with a React front end, which speaks the eTIR international system’s SOAP/XML message protocol on one side and presents customs officers with a modern web application on the other. It passed the official eTIR conformance tests and was deployed to production.

Phase 4 — Customs unions, and going open source (2025). A further contract in late 2025 delivered a proof of concept adapting the application for customs unions — where several member states operate as a single customs territory — so that itineraries spanning member states are handled as one operation, alongside a pluggable authentication layer supporting multiple identity providers. Every new dependency was selected for open-source compatibility, because UNECE was preparing to publish the code. 

The results

In October 2025, UNECE released the eTIR National Application as open-source software under the Apache 2.0 licence on the UN’s UNICC GitLab platform. In June 2026 it was presented at UN Open Source Week at UN Headquarters in New York as one of the first UN-developed open-source Digital Public Goods — software any government can adopt, inspect and build on, free of charge.

Ten countries — Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Moldova, Türkiye, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Tunisia — are now interconnected, directly or through the National Application. And unusually for consultancy work, the code itself is public: anyone can inspect the repository that this engagement helped build.

In the client’s words

“Our project involved the development, testing, and documentation of a complex open source web application built on React and Java technologies, designed to support international border crossing conventions used by governments worldwide… Working within the highly constrained and secure environment of the United Nations, he adapted seamlessly to strict protocols and safeguarded the integrity of the project at every step… He doesn’t simply address the requirements — he anticipates needs, proposes improvements, and consistently elevates the final product. I highly recommend Tucanoo Solutions Ltd to any organization or company seeking a reliable, skilled, and trusted partner for complex software development and consulting work.”

— (public Trustpilot review)

Technical summary

The eTIR National Application is a Java 17 / Spring Boot REST back end with a ReactJS front end and PostgreSQL persistence managed through Liquibase. Its core integration job is protocol translation: the eTIR international system communicates in paired SOAP/XML messages (declaration, guarantee and operation life-cycle exchanges), which the application exposes to its own front end and to national systems as clean REST/JSON APIs. Authentication supports ITDB credentials and pluggable OAuth providers such as Keycloak, so customs authorities can integrate their own identity systems. Internationalisation covers right-to-left scripts, with translations managed through Weblate. The application deploys as containers or directly onto a customs authority’s own Linux servers, and was verified against the official eTIR conformance test scenarios — including fallback procedures, guarantee suspension and mid-transport amendments — before production deployment. Development, testing and documentation followed UN standards throughout, with delivery via the UN’s GitLab and CI infrastructure.

About Tucanoo Solutions

Tucanoo Solutions is a UK software consultancy specialising in Java, Spring Boot, Grails and React — from modernising business-critical legacy systems to building new applications from scratch.

David Brown was engaged as an independent consultant to the UNECE TIR secretariat. This case study describes that work and does not imply endorsement by the United Nations.

Sources

All external claims in this case study are drawn from public sources (accessed July 2026):

1. TIR Convention and eTIR overview — unece.org/about-etir
2. Annex 11 entry into force, 25 May 2021 — unece.org
3. ITDB overview and registry figures — etir.org/itdb
4. eTIR National Application: purpose, 11-month direct-interconnection average, conformance tests, Apache 2.0 open-source release (17 October 2025) — etir.org/etir-national-application
5. UN Open Source Week 2026, Digital Public Good recognition, ten interconnected countries — etir.org, 3 July 2026
6. eTIR NA installation in Tajikistan and first cross-border transports — etir.org, April 2026
7. UN Secretary-General’s March 2020 report (“Shared responsibility, global solidarity”) on eTIR/eCMR — via IRU
8. eTIR National Application source code — opensource.unicc.org; customs-union proof-of-concept in the dev-1.0.3 branch
9. Client review — Trustpilot