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Customs' CMR: what it is and what it does

Peter Davidson, Information Age

12/10/2004 11:52:40

An examination of the Australian Customs Service (ACS) systems in 1996 has led to what its CIO, Murray Harrison, describes as the biggest e-government project in Australia.

Its Cargo Management Re-engineering Program (CMR) program, with its Integrated Cargo System (ICS) at its core, went live on October 6 after two years' intensive development.

It has been far from plain sailing for Customs with some radical changes of direction during the first years of its definition and planning, and some criticism from various industry and media commentators as time-lines lengthened and arguments over its real costs drew the ire of politicians (see box).

Essentially, the re-engineering project was needed to create a secure Web-based "single face of government" for players in the import/export supply chain to cope with annual trade processing volumes of 3 million import entries, 1.2 million export clearances, 4 million container and 100,000 flight movements, and the collection of nearly $7.5 billion in Customs duties.

It is a world first in this field; its nearest equivalent, the American ACE system is so far estimated to cost more than $US2bn and is still far from complete.

Half a dozen ageing, partially integrated legacy systems reaching end of life would be replaced by a single, custom-built IT platform with ICS as its central access and processing hub to allow for the direct reporting and management of cargo movements with direct interface with 12 other government agencies like Quarantine and Statistics.

Legislation passed in 2001 created a legal framework for electronic cargo management secured by Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) using the GateKeeper accredited certification authority to deliver registration or certification services to meet Commonwealth standards.

Sophisticated risk assessment procedures to protect Australia's borders got high priority in system design.

Individuals and businesses wanting to access the system need a digital certificate from a Customs-approved GateKeeper compliant certification authority, and must meet Customs requirements in their own systems to access the export side of ICS.

The more complex import side of ICS is scheduled to come on stream by the middle of next year.

Organisations wanting to access ICS using electronic data interchange (EDI) to batch communications can also do so. Its implementation under the new regime is detailed at customs.gov.au along with hundreds of pages of information on CMR's individual systems, customer registration, e-learning, external software development suppliers and rules, and general overviews.

A number of service providers were retained to develop and implement systems: Computer Associates' consortium with Kaz, IOCORE and NCR for applications, IBM for professional services (and some hardware and software under its arrangement with Customs outsource partner EDS), BeTrusted ( now Cybertrust )for PKI software and services for the Customs Connect Facility (CCF) "gateway", Novell for identity management and directory services software, and VeriSign for GateKeeper.

Long-established outsource partner EDS has recently had its contract for infrastructure support for mainframe, mid-range platforms and hosting applications, and for application production support and helpdesk services extended to June 30, 2007 bringing its total contract to $542m.

Once the import side of ICS is also in place, CMR will handle more than 30 million inbound messages annually and 93 million outbound.

Integrated Cargo System (ICS)

The cornerstone of CMR, ICS is an integrated system giving enhanced risk assessment at the border and allowing more efficient cargo tracking. Its software suite has 23,000 function points.

It operates on an IBM OS390 mainframe running ZOS with transactions in a CICS environment with DB2 database management. MQ-series provides the mainframe interfaces with the CCF gateway and other business applications.

Customs' Web-based user interface, Customs Interactive (CI) has a WebSphere Java application server front end. CI system software is hosted on infrastructure managed as part of the CCF gateway.

Transaction application code to support the cargo management business rules for both EDI and CI channels was developed in the AdvantageGen/CoolGen environment.

ICS's transaction and event processing architectures create and manage events to prioritise and balance message loads across the system to maintain throughput, with automatic exception and recovery management.

Design detail in the 19,000 pages of analysis for ICS includes 800 screens, 16,000 business rules, 70 complex business messages, 850 database tables, 3700 executable load modules, 1800 CICS transaction types, 55 batch jobs, 90 reports and 35 system interfaces.

Customs Connect Facility (CCF)

CCF is the gateway to Customs' business applications. Importers, exports and brokers can transact via an interactive mode (Customs Interactive) using industry standard Web services or with batch mode EDI.

A data transformation facility translates Customs and industry-agreed standards for data exchanges (eg UN/EDIFACT) to Customs' application requirements, significantly reducing customers' previous need to use a plethora of data formats.

It also allows Customs staff to track messages through the CCF.

Communication channel management and CI runs on Sun Solaris Unix platforms and Cisco routers, with validation and transformation processed on IBM P- and SP-series Unix platforms and Wintel servers running IBM AIX, Win2K, DB2 , WebSphere, Tivoli WebSeal and Baltimore's FormSecure.

Overall, the CMR architecture was designed to be multi-tiered, highly available, scalable and to have shared security components with common code bases (for services such as authentication and authorisation).

The CCF solution has its origins in the IBM e-business infrastructure reference architecture with J2EE, WS-Security (SAML), XML, UN/EDIFACT D99B and LDAP.