WCO Deadline Approaching for High-Risk Cargo Tracking System Tender

WCO said CTS also will improve supply chain visibility and security, promote fair and effective revenue collection, reduce illicit trade, allow better allocation of resources, and increase benefits from government-industry partnerships. CTS will be deployed as a stand-alone application and will compliment, not duplicate, existing legacy systems, WCO said.

CTS should be developed, tested, piloted and ready for deployment by June 30, 2013, WCO said. The tender said the CTS project will be divided into two phases:

• Development, testing and piloting the CTS application.
• Roll-out and implementation of CTS to user countries.

The tender is only for phase one, but WCO said tenderers should provide full details of the roll-out and implementation plans, together with all costs for their proposed solutions. Affordability and sustainability are key to the long term success, it said.

Other details, provided by WCO:

• CTS will be a pre-arrival cargo risk assessment and targeting tool that is suitable for all WCO members regardless of their existing infrastructure and capability. As a new standalone application without the dependencies of legacy systems, there is no preconceived view on the architecture of CTS.
• It's likely that early deployments will be to developing countries in need of capacity building assistance in cargo risk assessment and targeting.
• CTS will be standardized and will be the same for every user country.
• All hardware and software will be installed within the user country and will be used exclusively by the user country.
• CTS will initially be required to operate with the maritime container mode of transport in line with agreed WCO SAFE Framework of Standards data elements. But it should be capable of expansion to other modes of transport in line with the future development of SAFE FoS.
• CTS will operate with pre-arrival import cargo but will also be capable of operating with export and transshipment cargo.
• CTS will operate with 2 distinct types of data; manifests/bills of lading and customs declarations. It will receive and process manifest/bill of lading data prior to cargo arrival.
• CTS is not a customs declaration/entry processing system and will not adopt this role.
• WCO will seek to reach agreement with a small number of major container shipping lines to provide a standardized pre-arrival manifest/bill of lading data feed direct to each user country using industry standard methods. This data feed will be aligned with SAFE data elements and the WCO Data Model.
• It will be the responsibility of user countries to obtain data from remaining container shipping lines and others who issue or file bills of lading or house bills of lading.
• User countries will generate a standardized post-lodgment customs declaration data feed from their legacy customs declaration/entry processing system.
• CTS should be low cost to deploy with minimum reliance on expensive software and hardware and maximum use of open source and commercial off-the-shelf solutions.
• CTS should capture manifest data at container level for full container load (FCL) cargo, and at consignment level for less than full container load (LCL) cargo.
• CTS should capture Customs declaration data at item (HS Code) level, and, where possible, link manifest/bill of lading and customs declaration records relating to the same consignment.
• CTS should have entity resolution and entity standardization capability including being capable of recognising different spellings of the same involved party name.
• It should retain a count of records for each involved party name and display this count against each name in result sets.
• Users should be able to search the CTS database with one or any combination of available data fields.

Responses are due to Karen Garside, Head of Purchases, Sales and Contracts Service, Rue du Marché, 30, B-1210 Bruxelles, Belgique