CBP To Create ACE Performance Dashboard Soon, Working on Slowdown Issues
CBP is “headed in the right direction” as it works to resolve ACE system performance issues causing some concern in the trade community, the agency’s chief information officer, Phil Landfried, said at the July 27 meeting of the Customs Commercial Operations Advisory Committee (COAC). The agency is “not at 100 percent,” and “probably never will be,” but it’s “trying to get as close” as possible, he said. CBP will be deploying a performance dashboard “over the next couple of days” on its website, giving filers a way to see whether any issues they’re experiencing are systemwide, Landfried said. “If you’re seeing a slow response and we’re reporting green” on a red-yellow-green scale “then obviously there’s a disconnect there, and we should be able to address those right away.”
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The trade community has been seeing system slowdowns “more frequently than we would expect,” said Amy Magnus of A.N. Deringer, co-chair of the COAC’s One U.S. Government at the Border Subcommittee. Data transmissions and responses are taking too long from a broker’s perspective, she said at the meeting. The trade community is also “struggling” with the limitation of CBP’s apparent limit of 8 megabytes per transmission, which sometimes causes filers to submit two entries when they should only be filing one. CBP is actively looking into how to increase transmission size limits, Landfried said.
Importers of goods regulated by the Food and Drug Administration are “very pleased” with how quickly routinely imported commercial shipments are processed in ACE -- a “huge improvement” over the legacy Automated Commercial System -- but the trade community “continues to struggle with non-commercial shipments, such as research and development material or samples,” said Susie Hoeger of Abbott Laboratories, also co-chair of the One U.S. Government at the Border Subcommittee. At times it takes up to three weeks to get complex questions answers, partly because such shipments “don’t fall squarely within the regulations or they weren’t envisioned when message sets were being developed,” Hoeger said. “We understand there’s a learning curve but we hope there will be a knowledge database or knowledge sharing to allow the help desk to respond more quickly when similar issues are raised in the future.”
Hoeger also reiterated calls to bring back the Automated Invoice Interface (AII), which is no longer available since the switch to ACE. “This is very important for some in our industry that have many-page-long invoices with many data lines, who have been using automated invoices for up to 15 years now,” she said. “Having to revert to that manual process is quite time-consuming," and creates a lot of work for brokers and filers, she said. A software developer said last month that CBP doesn’t anticipate recreating AII in ACE until the new system’s core functionalities have all been deployed, meaning brokers and importers will have to wait until 2017 at the earliest (see 1606060019).