How the U.S. Digital Service Is Making America’s Import System More Efficient
By Chris Frommann
Imagine a morning cup of coffee. The ingredients — the coffee beans and the milk and sugar that might get added — come from all over the world: the milk could be from Wisconsin, the beans might have traveled from Ecuador, or maybe Ethiopia, and the sugar probably came from Brazil or Thailand. Something as seemingly simple as a cup of coffee involves a global supply chain, and that’s before you even consider the cup itself. How do these goods make it into the U.S.? How do we ensure that they’re safe for consumers?
Enter U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”), the law enforcement agency responsible for regulating trade in the United States.
As the largest U.S. federal law enforcement agency and as the successor to the U.S. Customs Service, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has origins as a tariff collecting agency that are nearly as old as the country itself.
From 1789, until federal income tax collection began in 1913 (after the passage of the 16th Amendment), tariffs collected by the U.S. Customs Service were the primary source of funds for the U.S. Treasury, funding westward expansion, the transcontinental railroad, and military academies like West Point.
Over the last 200 years, trade has changed dramatically. Trade has increased in size and importance to the U.S. economy in both real and relative terms, with imports jumping from around $77 million a year in the early 19th century (~$1.4 billion in 2015 dollars) to almost $2.8 trillion a year in 2015. In the same period, exports went from $59 million (~$1.1 billion in 2015 dollars) to $2.3 trillion in 2015.
The Challenge
Local coffee shops aren’t just selling coffee, they also have tea, sandwiches, fruits, coffee machines, or mugs in stock. Importers often package many different types of products together in a single shipping container. This means that processing just one container often requires multiple agencies — like the Food and Drug Administration or the Consumer Product Safety Commission, depending on the products — to get involved. Previously, this would involve multiple agencies each with different forms that needed to be submitted — leading to inefficiencies, confusion, and mistakes.
How might CBP streamline a process that requires checks and balances, but also needs automation and process engineering?
As trade has changed dramatically over the last two centuries, so too has technology and the means of collecting data and analyzing data on imports and exports. Records barely existed prior to 1820, and for the next 164 years, all information was captured on reams and reams of paper. Starting in 1984, importers began filing documentation electronically via the new “Automated Commercial System” (ACS) at Customs, which by 1988 was processing 62% of formal entries electronically.
So in 2001, the U.S. Customs Service announced the creation of the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), a platform that would fulfill the vision of a “single window” — the idea that all necessary documents could be “submitted once at a single entry point to fulfill all import, export, and transit-related regulatory requirements” with a backend system to handle the dissemination and coordination of data. This would replace the now outdated, green-screen ACS. Design started on what would prove to be a herculean effort in 2003, but implementation and testing were delayed several times due to technical and process challenges. In 2013, CBP transitioned to agile development practices and began to rapidly develop functionality. The ACE transition was further accelerated by Executive Order 13659 (“Streamlining the Export/Import Process for America’s Businesses”) in 2014, which mandated the completion of a Single Window for trade processing by December 31, 2016.
The Solution
To help implement the Executive Order, a development and deployment schedule was defined based on careful planning and prioritization with input from stakeholders. To achieve the single window by the deadline, emphasis had to be given to the development of those core capabilities most necessary to support the primary end-to-end processing requirements to keep trade secure and commerce flowing. CBP developed a plan to cut-over functionality from ACS to ACE in stages, creating separate transition deadlines for:
1) Information on the manifest of goods being shipped
2) Electronic submission of data for the release of cargo from ports
3) Receipt of items that entered the country (an “entry summary”)
To help overcome some technical challenges, CBP engaged the U.S. Digital Service in 2015.
We found that CBP was already following many best practices of the Digital Services Playbook. We learned that the following existed:
• A largely agile process
• A single product owner
• A gradual rollout plan
• Version controlled code
• A strategy to implement robust monitoring
From there, USDS worked alongside CBP engineers and product owners to allocate more time for automated unit and integration testing and to address technical debt, which results when the fastest solution is chosen instead of the best, making it harder and harder over time to implement changes. Within a few weeks, teams saw test coverage double and then triple alongside system stability. Tests caught bugs, prevented regressions, and verified correct behavior.
Simultaneously, CBP and USDS engineers are working to move the first applications to the cloud as part of an ongoing effort to make ACE more resilient and cheaper and faster to deploy. New cloud-based applications are already auto-scaling based on demand and plans to refactor or rewrite legacy ACE modules are being developed.
And in an effort to transparently present availability and business metrics to the trade community, partner agencies, and software integrators, the joint team developed a Flask-based availability dashboard. This dashboard leverages the data already available in AppDynamics and other systems to indicate when ACE is experiencing slow or otherwise degraded performance (e.g. message delays) as well as downtime due to network, component, or other failure. Previously, everyone from end-users to agency leadership across agencies would depend on e-mail alerts (often delayed) with system data; now this data is available in real-time.
What’s Next?
Having reached the deadline to fully transition to ACE and decommission ACS, we’re going to continue to help ACE move to the cloud to reduce infrastructure costs and increase reliability and uptime. And having reached nearly 100% usage for entry summaries, cargo releases, and manifests, we’re going to help teams in their effort to focus not just on release frequency, but release quality. We’re also applying user-centered design techniques to ensure ACE is designed with — not for — the hundreds of thousands of trade professionals and government officials who depend on the software every day.
Ultimately, we look forward to helping unlock tremendous economic benefits by modernizing how businesses import goods into the United States.
Chris Frommann is a Software Engineer for the Digital Service at the Department of Homeland Security
