Customs ACEs the IT test

Customs' Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) will revolutionize the way importers and exporters do business with the government. Here's an update on what's happened so far, and what's coming in the future.

By Toby B. Gooley, Managing Editor -- Logistics Management, 8/1/2005

It's been a long time coming, but ACE, the Automated Commercial Environment, is finally a reality.

Well, part of it is, anyway.

The new information management system developed for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was proposed about 10 years ago to replace the outdated Automated Commercial System (ACS). ACS was handling entry and duty-payment processing and various statistical reports for Customs. But as the volume of imports surged, it became clear that neither ACS nor the existing level of staffing would be able to handle the rising tide of international trade.

Customs officials envisioned a more powerful system that could automate manual transactions and let importers and customs brokers take on more responsibility for information management. But they were unable to convince Congress to fully fund the project, even as ACS suffered breakdowns from excessive volume.

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All that changed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Customs took the lead on cargo security, and lawmakers finally recognized that modernizing the agency's IT system was both imperative and urgent. Money was found for ACE—but a different version, one that would address security as well as trade facilitation.

ACE finally began rolling out in 2004 as a series of releases covering various types of transactions. (See the chart, at right.) As of mid-May 2005, there were 530 activated ACE accounts, including importers, customs brokers, and carriers. Exporters eventually will also participate in the wide-ranging system.

The timetable calls for completion in 2010, but CBP hopes to finish the project sooner, said Lou Samenfink, director of CBP's Office of Modernization, at the Coalition of New England Companies for Trade (CONECT) annual conference.

ACE is a project that international shippers should watch closely. Even in its early stages, ACE's impact on international trade management will be far-reaching and revolutionary. "They're not just trying to re-do what they've done with ACS," says Samuel H. Banks, a senior vice president at Sandler & Travis Trade Advisory Services and a former assistant commissioner of Customs. "They're really trying to explore new ways for the trade community to do business."

Four Main Objectives

ACE is a huge, complex, long-term project, but it can be summed up in terms of four main objectives:

Automate virtually all of CBP's trade-processing and data-collection tasks;

Give the trade community greater responsibility for, and access to, trade information;

Allow CBP to better use technology to screen, evaluate, and track cargo for security purposes;

Provide a platform for sharing information between various federal government agencies.

The need to streamline and automate data processing and collection prompted CBP to use ACE as a tool for implementing a radical change in the way it handles import entries—a change so important that it required enabling legislation.

Since the agency was founded in 1789, Customs has processed each import entry separately, a practice known as "transaction-based processing." Each entry, moreover, was processed at the port where it entered the country.

But as import volumes soared, the number of entries exploded. That's why CBP has designed ACE to support "account-based processing," which aggregates an importer's entries under the watchful eyes of assigned import specialists. Continued...

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