In recent years interorganizational communicationand coordinationhave relied increasingly on the exchange of EDIFACT-messages. Thisis especially true for the logistics sector. In order for the senderto keep control over the forwarder's proper delivery process, statusmessages prove that certain milestones have been achieved. Takinginto account that only a very small number of shipments faceproblems leading to a delay in delivery, this principle of pushedinformation causes a large amount of unnecessary EDIFACT-messages.In addition, many forwarders already allow their customers to requeststatus information via WWW. A software agent based concept ispresented to cope with the problem described, taking advantage ofthe WWW-services provided. The system called ECTL-Monitor(Electronic Commerce Transport Logistics) was developed incooperation with a large company sending more than 10 millionshipments per year. The mainidea of the concept is to leave data of the transport process on theforwarders' computer systems and to access these remote system whennecessary. On demand software agents collect status information ofall forwarders involved in the transportation chain, which veryoften includes up to four different logistics service companies.