Today, 250,000 vessels carry cars, parts and equipment, clothing, steel, and all sorts of other commodities and manufactured goods that pass through the seaports monitored by the U.S. Customs Service. The current number of vessels is already an amazing amount, yet this is expected to grow by five percent per year.

While shipyards have built vessels to handle 6,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers, there are new "super" ships designed for service in 2010 that may carry more than twice this amount (15,000 TEUs). Stack this number of containers end to end on the interstate, the capacity of one "super-ship," and they would stretch for approximately 100 miles. That's a lot of cargo.

VMS will help to expedite the entry and clearance of commercial vessels like the one pictured above.

This kind of increase could have overwhelmed Customs ability to handle the data management and documentation requirement at seaports if not for a new Intranet-based Vessel Management System (VMS) that Customs debuted on April 2, 2001.

Information management
VMS can "summarize and track all types of vessel-identifying operations and give Customs port-specific information like entrance, clearance, bunker (fuel pumped for vessel operation), crew, and licenses used for private yachts," says John Considine, Director, Commercial Processing, Office of Trade Programs. "However, the main purpose of VMS is the entry and clearance of all commercial vessels into and out of U.S. ports."

Seaport information was handled manually, until VMS was piloted at four U.S. ports of entry - Anchorage, Alaska; Baton Rouge, La.; Norfolk, Va.; and Los Angeles/Long Beach, Calif. "With the increase in port traffic and projected enlargement of vessel capacity, VMS was vital to standardize and automate the program," says Considine. Expanding nationwide, VMS will be installed at all designated Customs seaports this year.

The Office of Trade Programs has three specific objectives for VMS: 1) get all seaports on the system; 2) help the trade community use VMS, which expands its application capability for entrance and clearance, allows expedited marine documentation verification, and the filing requirements for the collection of fees and tax; and 3) provide a read-only version on the Customs Web site.

VMS - The great pipeline
VMS dramatically improves the filing of vessel information, and the movement of people and goods. This is possible because Customs is replacing its aging, technologically obsolete wide area network (WAN) with a new WAN known as "frame relay."

Frame relay is a reliable, modern WAN technology that is cost-effective, commercially available, and industry standard for enabling Web-based applications. Response time will be faster due to increased bandwidth, which is the amount of information that can flow through a channel. This will provide optimal performance for both mainframe and Web-based applications. The Office of Information and Technology with the aid of Oracle developed VMS while TRW worked to set up frame relay at Customs sites. Frame relay will enable Web applications such as VMS to run effectively and efficiently using a state of the art WAN.

The new VMS via frame relay offers data transfer that handles massive amounts of information to link all Customs seaports. Here is a visualization of what frame relay offers to the seaports' past data collection: Imagine swells of water that pour into huge storm sewers after a torrential rain. The large pipes can handle the movement and distribution of the flow because of its size and capacity. Then, imagine that same amount of water funneling into a half-inch yard hose. There's a huge backup of flow and only a portion of the water can manage to pass through the hose. The incoming pressure increases so substantially that the hose eventually explodes from the pressure.

VMS is "the great pipeline." Designed to solve the flow problem and open the communications channels, VMS allows the data management system to expedite, store, distribute, and better manage vessel information that will be able to identify specifics on all ships using U.S. ports.

"The system went "live" at 8 a.m. (Eastern Standard Time) on April 2, and although there were some glitches at startup, we got great feedback and input from our field personnel," says Considine. "This really is a bang-up program with an extraordinary computer application."

Perks for all
The VMS offers substantial benefits to Customs and the trade community. Because VMS is completely electronic, the trade community can reduce their time in port, expedite documentation requirements, obtain a faster resolution to documentation flaws that can delay freight, and eventually gain quicker release of cargo.

All of this in place, VMS can better accommodate the Just-In-Time processing needs of the nation's fast-paced 21st Century schedule. But more important for Customs, the electronic process will relieve its workforce from tedious manual requirements to a simpler, more dynamic, faster, and all-round better electronic version of this administrative task.

A central benefit of the new system is its ability to reduce the administrative chores at seaports so that the workforce can dedicate more time to key enforcement issues. It also allows Customs to build a National Database Repository that supplements its data warehouse.

Explains Considine, "An important aspect of VMS is that it will link into a Vessel History Index, which as an enforcement tool, can key into vessel history and/or crew violations that may be connected to the trafficking of contraband goods and a lot of other important enforcement concerns."

More than 60 Customs marine officers have completed VMS training at Customs Data Center and will serve as a core group to instruct seaport personnel on using the new system.