U.K. Customs has approved a new electronic “fallback” system to take over the processing of air cargo shipments should the agency’s umbrella IT system experience a prolonged outage.
U.K. Customs has approved a new electronic “fallback” system to take over the processing of air cargo shipments should the agency’s umbrella system, Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF), experience a prolonged outage.
The system was designed by BT Air Logistics, which runs the CCS-UK service that handles the United Kingdom’s air cargo messaging and customs declarations. CCS-UK is made up of the country’s freight forwarders, ground handling agents and airlines and lobbies U.K. Customs on behalf of the air cargo industry to modify and improve IT functions in CHIEF.
“We have recently seen the horrendous impact of major IT system failures in aviation, and this cannot be allowed to happen to the U.K. air cargo industry,” said Steve Parker, DHL’s head of customs for Europe and chairman of the CCS-UK User Group, in a statement.
The air cargo industry plays a significant role in the U.K. economy. According to a 2015 report by the Airports Commission, 40 percent by value of the country’s trade outside the European Union was transported by air, with the total value of traded goods through U.K. airports exceeding £140 billion in 2014.
The British air cargo industry said without the fallback system any significant downtime of CHIEF would result in severe “cargo backlogs and mayhem at UK airports, and cost the economy tens of millions of pounds.”
“CCS-UK Fallback” allows authorized traders to continue processing their U.K. Customs export declarations during a system outage, and receive automatic fallback clearance to ship goods without delay. Import entries will also receive fallback clearance, avoiding a backlog that would result from manual customs clearance processes, the system’s designers said.
The fallback system will operate for up to 30 days. As soon as CHIEF returns to normal operation, the fallback system will transmit all stored entries for processing in the normal way.
“We’re urging the specialist IT systems providers for the air cargo community to update their products to take advantage of this new feature, while the industry as a whole should start training its staff so that everyone is ready to use the new function should we need to implement it,” said Colm O’Neill, BT’s managing director for major business and public sector.
A series of industry trials is being planned in which access to CHIEF will be temporarily suspended.
CCS-UK Fallback is also expected to play a role with U.K. Customs’ transition from CHIEF to its replacement (CDS), “enabling the air cargo industry to continue functioning as normal in the event of any teething problems with the new hardware or software,” BT said.
If U.K. Customs’ CHIEF blinks…
