The system, which is now active for the March 'C' delivery, offers the user increased cost savings and efficiency, with greater speed and convenience of electronic documentation and transfer.

"Our eCOPS system is the natural evolution of an older, paper-intensive process which has served the coffee and cocoa industries well over the years," said Charles H. 'Harry' Falk, NYBOT’s President and CEO. "One of NYBOT's goals as the focal point of both industries is to bring the coffee and cocoa delivery systems for exchange and non-exchange deliveries into the 21st Century - I encourage those in both industries who have not done it yet, to register for and begin testing the eCOPS system as soon as possible."

For the March Coffee 'C' delivery on the Exchange, all deliveries, sampling, and weighing will be accomplished using the electronic documents. The eCOPS team is assisting all current holders of warehouse receipts for certified exchange coffee to convert the paper receipts into the EWR format. The conversion process has already been tested with the September and December delivery process, and the exchange is converting all 15,000 warehouse receipts before the first notice day of the March 'C' contract.

The eCOPS formally became a network for the delivery of coffee when the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) designated eCOPS, LLC, as the first official provider of Electronic Warehouse Receipts and the exchange officially adopted new rules requiring use of eCOPS for exchange delivery.

The seventy accounts that have signed on to eCOPS now make the official designation of the system as a 'provider' a reality. Warehousemen, Samplers, Weighers, Bankers, and Future Commission Merchants, representing the largest names in the coffee industry, have already signed up and many more are now joining. The NYBOT also continues to contact the dealers and roasters on both ends of the supply pipeline so that eCOPS can take advantage of true Straight-Through-Processing (STP), the automation of end-to-end trade processing.

The eCOPS registration process is simple, free and provides full access to the many capabilities and features of the system. Users of eCOPS only pay a small charge for documents created by the web-based platform. Numerous training sessions have been held for warehousemen, samplers, weighers, and FCMs both in Europe and the USA. Training sessions for coffee dealers and roasters began in mid-January.

The eCOPS system is not just for exchange deliveries, as coffee can now be stored, financed, sampled, weighed, and delivered in the commercial market also using eCOPS. For non-exchange deliveries, registration for eCOPS remains totally free. The only cost to use the system is the standard nominal fee for documents issued by eCOPS.

For more than ten years, the COPS system effectively managed coffee and cocoa deliveries for the exchange, however, the delivery and warehousing methods were logistically complex for far-reaching supply chains that require significant numbers of manually processed document presentations.

On October 15, 2002, NYBOT announced it had begun development of the eCOPS program, which transforms the pioneering COPS process into a modern B2B commodity management system that can serve as an industry standard to automate the manually intensive and costly back office activities currently associated with coffee and cocoa deliveries. The new eCOPS handles electronic versions of warehouse receipts, delivery orders, sampling orders, weight notes, invoices, and insurance declarations. The system can serve exporters, importers, roasters, grinders, bankers, insurance companies, ocean carriers, customs brokers, as well as current COPS users including FCMs, warehouses, samplers and weighers.