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Ships Turned Away As Aussie Customs' IT System Melts Down

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the if-it-ain't-broke dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Urgent shipments of medicine and goods for the holiday season have been turned away by customs officials due to a massive computer problem. The initial budget for the system upgrade was said to be A$80 million but has since blown out to A$250 million. Customs officials and the government have been forced to admit that they might actually have to revert to the old system if things don't improve. One cargo user said on national TV that he used to process 300 orders daily but the new system is so complex and unusable, he's happy if he can manage 100 orders per day. The system failure is expected to have a massive impact especially on the retail sector this Christmas."

7 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. No ships turned away yet. by palndrumm · · Score: 5, Informative

    All the news and radio reports I've read and heard (including TFA) have made no mention of ships being actually turned away at this stage. So far they're just saying that the storage space at the ports is rapidly filling up, so if the processing rate doesn't improve soon they will have to look at turning ships away. But as far as I can tell, they're planning to roll back to the old system before that becomes necessary...

  2. Don't you love Federal/State point scoring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.customs.gov.au/site/page.cfm?c=6361

    Partial quote...

    "Customs is doing everything possible to resolve technical and business issues arising from the introduction of the new Integrated Cargo System (ICS) for imports.

    "Contrary to some media reports, the new IT system for imports has not failed, nor is its performance solely responsible for the problems that have occurred.

    "The problems experienced in part, flow from inaccurate and incomplete information being submitted by some users, which the new system is designed not to accept for security reasons," the spokesman said.

  3. Some more info on who developed it by TheNarrator · · Score: 4, Informative

    Computer World Article

    ICS is a cornerstone of Customs' massive Cargo Management Re-engineering (CMR) project. This was intended to replace the export and brokerage industry-developed EDI system Customs Connect with a Web-based model co-developed by Customs and a consortium of IT vendors led by Computer Associates. The project aims to facilitate all aspects of Customs involvement in the import and export process including declarations and GST transactions collected at port.

    Nother Article
    More than seven years to this point of readiness, ICS is a cornerstone of Customs' massive Cargo Management Re-engineering (CMR) project, which will replace the export and brokerage industry-developed EDI system, Customs Connect. CMR is a Web-based model co-developed by Customs and a consortium of IT vendors led by Computer Associates, EDS, IBM and Telstra nee Kaz.

  4. Who is behind this? by new-black-hand · · Score: 4, Informative
    As if they didn't see it coming, the bastards. Here is an article from the SMH from January of 2004:
    Customs Minister Chris Ellison will meet software developers and industry groups tomorrow after finding persistent bugs in the latest version of the Australian Customs Service's ambitious new import and export system. Most of version 3 of the system was delivered to developers last week for testing, but problems have persisted. "Customs is burning money like it is going out of style," one developer told Next.
    The Customs Office and it's IT outsourcing arrangements have previously been the subject of a senate enquiry, lets hope that they get nothing less again this time around and the people responsible are bought to account. One thing I did notice is that not a single article reports on who the developers behind the project are. My knowledge is that Computer Associates have slowly started taking over things from EDS at customs - can anyone confirm?
  5. Re:The obvious question... by ChatHuant · · Score: 5, Informative

    What OS do they run?

    What software do they use?

    CA, NCR and IBM are the service providers; Novell's providing the directory service.

    The ICS (Integrated Cargo System) application is running on an IBM OS390 mainframe; the OS is ZOS, the database is DB2. The web interface is Java, using WebSphere.

    The CCF (Customs Connect Facility) runs on Sun Solaris Unix platforms (using a variety of other servers for validation and transformation). Again, the database is DB2 and the interface uses WebSphere Java.

    More information here.

  6. Re:Not Entirely a Software Problem by Zellis · · Score: 5, Informative
    Partially true. The new system does require considerably more detail and accuracy, but that's only one of the issues that's come up. Another issue that's come up is that more detail = more data to process, and the system appears like it wasn't designed with that in mind: it's been severely overloaded all week. Add to that the non-existant training in the new system (my company was given what amounted to a 3-minute demonstration of the new interface we had to use before being required to use it exclusively), the bugs that are still being worked out (some of which have made data entry impossible for hours at a time), and a very poor effort at explaining the new procedures that Customs have implemented as a result of the change-over, and you get the current situation.

    It's true that the main problem isn't the software (although the bugs don't help): it's the way the new system was implemented

  7. Re:The obvious question... by pookemon · · Score: 4, Informative

    What OS do they run?

    The same OS they've been using for a while (WinXP)

    What software do they use?

    Is a custom built system - written by EDS I believe.

    And how will their IT people and/or management continue to justify said choices in the wake of this?

    "Their" IT people didn't make the choices - Customs IT is provided by EDS (which is why I believe EDS also developed the system). The choices would have been made by higher management - but ultimately it doesn't matter, if the system is failing then it's the design of the system or the hardware in use - which I would expect is top dollar equipment, charged for at higher than retail prices (it's a government contract). The IT experts in Customs are more for retrieving data of hard disks after they've been seized etc. Customs hasn't managed their own IT for years now.

    This is the sort of thing that needs "big iron". Machines that have uptimes measured in decades. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that they're running it all on a bunch of commodity PCs (or the like) with off-the-shelf software?

    This is laughable at best. How many "off the shelf" packages have you seen for handling Customs? The new package (and the old I expect) is a custom built piece of software (heck even the summary pointed this out - A$80 million but has since blown out to A$250 million - that is not "off-the-shelf")

    The system itself was written specifically for customs and has great features like it was too big to fit on all the monitors that customs was using (so naturally EDS upgraded all the machines - at a price - to have 19" LCD's).

    --
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