Over the years, Pakistan Customs has seen an increase in adoption of technological infrastructure, upgrading the conventional way of facilitating international trade and leading important digital transformation initiatives.
The result is an improved trade environment, expanded exports, and creation of more employment opportunities.
Digital transformation in cross-border trade is recognized as a proven way towards faster, easier and sustainable economic growth. It reduces the time and cost of importing and exporting goods thus increasing trade at the ports.
In an ensuing effort, the World Customs Organization (WCO) dedicated it’s 2022 theme as “Scaling up Customs Digital Transformation by embracing Data Culture and building a Customs Data Driven Ecosystem”. Under this theme, WCO directs its member countries to enable a digital data ecosystem in their custom systems.
In line with the WCO’s 2022 theme, Pakistan Customs has already joined the developed countries in its efforts of enabling a competitive data driven ecosystem.
Nearly two decades ago, the institution decided to go paperless, thereby forming a bedrock of today’s fully integrated single national window, bringing an inclusive economic environment for people as a result.
Key Definitions:
- Digital Transformation is a general term that describes an organization’s use of digital technology to improve business operations.
- Part of digital transformation is enabling a ‘Data Culture’ that means using data in business decision making. A data culture frees employees from intuition by offering key data that is logical and empowers them to make intelligent decisions.
- A Data Driven Ecosystem serves as a backbone of a digital transformation initiative. It consists of techniques, tools, and technology infrastructure related to data capturing, cleaning, storing, and analysis.
Towards a Single Window
It started in 2005, when Pakistan Customs decided to develop its first computerized system for a paperless and fast customer facilitation.
This computerized system was called Pakistan Customs Computerized System (PCCS) becoming the first repository of digital data and later formed the basis of a data-driven ecosystem we witness today.
In 2011, Pakistan Customs developed its second digital system with the name Web Based One Customs (WeBOC), an automated platform that digitizes trade clearance process, provides access to tariff information, and container availability, and acts as a single window for all custom parties.
Impact: Today, WeBOC clears 95% of imports and exports electronically, making flow of goods faster in imports and exports.
Pakistan Single Window: an integrated digital platform
Why the need of a single window?
Pakistan Customs’ recent technological breakthrough is its single window digital platform known as Pakistan Single Window (PSW), that solves the limitations in the WeBOC system; WeBOC only digitized the customs clearance process, but the non-custom clearance still lacked digital processing.
Vision: Soft-launched in April 2021, PSW was developed with a vision of an automated and well-integrated solution to digitize all custom and non-custom documentation procedures that will be available to trade participants under a single window.
Hence, PSW works by interconnecting all 74 participant agencies related to international trade at a single window that is accessed by traders to enable a faster, easier and cheaper trade.
The prominent features of PSW are:
Data Management and Analytics: The most attractive feature of PSW is its Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, and Analytics capability that powers robust regulatory compliance and risk management.
Knowledge Management System: The data storage and analytics capabilities also facilitates participants with useful statistics and information related to trade, regulation, and fiscal concerns.
Data Harmonization: All data fields are stored in a single data dictionary, with a single data field for similar data, to facilitate ease in data storage and retrieval.
Automated Routing: Using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology, PSW automatically routes applications to the OGAs (other government agencies) under well-defined business rules.
Automated Validation: The Licenses, Permits, Certificates and Others (LPCOs) are automatically validated using information retrieval.
Automated Cargo Management System: PSW integrates all ports (including seaports, dryports, airports, and land borders), fetching information regarding cargo delivery, and arrival, facilitating cargo tracking for users.
Integrated Risk Assessment: IRMS is an integrated risk management system that uses RPA technology to select consignments (goods in trade), and passengers for inspection, thereby enabling efficient resource utilization. PSW will integrate with the National Targeting Center (NTC) to access data of traders, custom officers, and agencies which shall serve as an input to the risk assessment algorithm.
Security: The digital platform ensures reliability and integrity of data (documents, transactions, historic data) as per industry standards.
Parallel Processing: Each application is sent to each OGA to enable parallel processing for time saving. An OGA shall retrieve its application and process it as per requirements. At the end, the application is integrated as final.
E-payments: Making trade payments digital deters the need to visit banks, ports, and other agencies.
E-Appointments: The platform supports electronic appointments, making it easy for users to book appointments without the need to visit physical sites.
How PSW impacted Pakistan’s trade environment?
The above features offer citizens of Pakistan the following excellent benefits:
Inclusive Trade Environment: With a single digital platform, Pakistan Customs gracefully achieves an inclusive trade environment allowing people from less powerful social classes to participate in cross-border trade via conventional business or e-commerce.
This is powerful for encouraging the women of Pakistan to achieve their trade goals using PSW.
Cost Savings: Before PSW, the blockage of cargo at ports led to a loss of $500 million in cross-border trade. PSW saves these costs by keeping record of trade inflows and outflows and planning efficient utilization of resources and collaborating with other agencies to help prevent the risks.
Time Savings: PSW saves time to export and import a container in Pakistan drastically. Before PSW, the time taken to import a container in Pakistan was 216 hours, and that for exporting a container was 113 hours.
This is because the documentation process had been manual and required parties to visit 74 facilitation sites respectively. PSW now offers citizens to submit documents just once, thereby reducing the time for document processing.
Wrapping it up!
Pakistan Single Window is an excellent effort in boosting international trade in Pakistan setting a successful example of using Digital Transformation in achieving the country’s strategic objectives.
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