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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."

4 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. 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.

  4. 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