Facilitating Trade:
Improving Customs Risk Management Systems
In the OIC Member States
166
Box 11: New Zealand Customs Big Data Concept
New Zealand Customs and its border partner, Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI), are
currently undertaking a modernization project in which analytics tools have been delivered for
risk assessment and border management purposes. While their capability is still in the early
phases, the relevant technology has already been in place behind an analytics team comprised
of Customs, Immigration, and MPI officers. The co-located team is in the process of combining
multi-agency datasets and developing targeting models while looking into the existing data to
find patterns and connections that may provide insights and inform their decision making. New
Zealand Customs is of the view that this joint team’s ongoing collaboration with the
Administration’s Information Services group has been beneficial for prioritizing analytics data
requirements.
Business intelligence
Advances in the technologywarehousing systems support sophisticated BI online analysis based
on the multi-dimensional analysis, necessary for the CRM and LE. With the possibility to drill
down/drill up the data with the BI solution, the obtaining of more detailed indicators make it
easier to collect targeted information. Hence, to assess risks, it is practical to break down the
risk profiles in indicators and sub-indicators. The creation of accurate risk profiles depends on
the reliability of the indicators since the quality of the profiles shall improve compliance
controls.
The BI encompasses the technologies, applications, and means for collecting, integrating,
analyzing, and presenting business data to understand and analyze trends, strengths, and
weaknesses and enable better decision making in customs organizations. The BI is a primary
mechanism for presenting the information from all available sources into consolidated data in a
way it can be easily managed, accessed, and analyzed.
The BI thus enables the creation of knowledge base allowing customs to deploy resources more
effectively, increase operational efficiency, determine effectiveness, and identify new streams of
customs operations. The BI model can include analysis on all required dimensions such as
companies, countries, customs procedures, regimes, goods, staff, customs locations, date, and
valuation methods and combine them with measures like a tax, duty and excise amounts, cargo
weight, uplifts, processing time, selectivity control, etc.
Real-time (ad hock) analytics; the need of customs CRM to accelerate tactical and operational
decision making will drive the use of real-time or ad-hock analytics. In turn, real-time decision
making will increase the need for complex-event processing, where IT systems incorporate
continuous data feeds, assess their relevance, and trigger fully automated responses or provide
alerts and other immediate analytic support for human decisions. The growing information
collected by the CRM will also increase the need for complex-event processing (CEP) to support
decisions and the data related to specific events – place, time, and modus operandi, method of
concealment, means of transport, perceived importance, quality or value of the information, as
well as its relationship to other information/events.
CEP is the basis for a growing number of pattern-Based CRM, particularly those that leverage
tactical and operational intelligence. CEP enables activity monitoring used to control or monitor
physical assets and processes in real time (or near real-time).