Something magical happened about 4,000 years ago. Human civilization birthed the famous “Silk Road.” This interconnected travel corridor stretching more than 6,500 km opened a vast new world to support the flow of goods and facilitate religious, scientific, cultural, linguistic, and philosophical exchanges on a scale never before seen.
The creation of the Silk Road is just one of many examples of impactful inventions that have revolutionized how humans do things. Others include the steam engine, the Internet, and now generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).
Each of these examples is what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” – the process whereby a new tool or technology completely upends and makes obsolete the old way of doing business.
As customs authorities grapple with the range of systems available to assist the inspection of cargo, vehicles, and personnel crossing their international borders, they find themselves interacting with multiple user interfaces, platforms, and databases.
Nearly all forms of creative destruction produce extraordinary opportunities to accelerate commerce. However, they also contain many challenges regarding safety, exploitation, cultural norms, and sovereign regulations. Achieving the dramatic increases in efficiency and effectiveness that new technologies portend requires the adoption or adaptation of new concepts of operations (CONOPS).
Going with the CONOPS Flow
The Silk Road facilitated trade among individuals who spoke a variety of languages and were unknown to each other. Yet they managed to somehow standardize their trading interactions. This is the genesis of customs and border screening solutions like the CertScan® platform. Its ability to “speak” various OEM digital formats, human languages, and the WCO’s new unified file format (UFF) has produced several creative destruction improvements for its early adopters.
In other words, we now have a Digital Silk Road integrating, storing, and sharing all forms of customs information (imagery, manifests, biometrics, risk) for the benefit of all stakeholders – producers, consumers, and regulators. However, achieving CertScan’s anticipated outcomes required a complete rethinking of customs agency and inspection agent CONOPS and workflows.
Disruptive Tech + Creative CONOPs = Substantial Outcomes
With a networked integration platform solutions like CertScan located at a consolidated command center, properly trained agents are assigned to more efficiently read and interpret images from multiple scanners in sequence, using a single user-friendly UX irrespective of the OEM resulting in a more efficient ratio of one-to-many (1:M).
From a data integration perspective, ‘starting with the CONOP’ is best achieved by defining an end-to-end workflow and considering how data is captured and moved throughout that workflow.
With the optimum number of workstations and analysts, this new CONOPS increased scanning rates from an average 10% or less to a remarkable 100% in just a few short weeks. Intuitively, there’s an assumption that such a 10x improvement in scan rates would drastically reduce officers’ ability to screen for illicit cargo or to properly collect import/export duties.
However, new CONOPS and workflows at the port of entry and within the command center related to risk analysis, secondary screening, and data sharing proved otherwise. Furthermore, increasing scan rates while simultaneously maintaining or enhancing security and regulatory compliance normally implies the necessity of growing the workforce or dramatically slowing the flow of conveyances through the inspection lanes. Yet once again, with the proper combination of technology and modified CONOPS, today’s workforce was able to achieve tomorrow’s objectives.
Streamlined Systems Integration
As customs authorities grapple with the range of systems available to assist the inspection of cargo, vehicles, and personnel crossing their international borders, they find themselves interacting with multiple user interfaces, platforms, and databases. And as trade volumes increase, there is an increasing demand for automation and efficiencies in time-sensitive inspection processes. The integration of multiple systems using meshed, real-time communications is desirable to enable the collection, processing, movement and analysis of data, enable decisions, carry out actions, and produce auditable records.
Increasingly, customs authorities are focusing on ‘systems integration’ but can be uncertain where to start and unclear on the desired outcome. Authorities might look to maximize the use of software to replace the dull, dirty, or dangerous activities and focus their personnel on higher cognitive tasks, using operational and ethical judgments where they are most needed.
Recent advances in software, the commoditization of compute power and advanced networking solutions enable us to meaningfully move away from many humans being required to make a single system operationally relevant. We can create a network of systems to streamline workflows and invert the people-to-machine ratio.
Always Start with the CONOP
Optimizing how both software and hardware technologies are best applied by personnel is always determined by the CONOP which involves an in-depth understanding of the environment, inspection mission objectives, traffic patterns, smuggling techniques, stakeholders in the process, and various constraints and freedoms. A well-defined CONOP optimizes for likely patterns or ‘business as usual’ while enabling contingency responses to anticipated or unusual changes.
Recent advances in software, the commoditization of compute power and advanced networking solutions enable us to meaningfully move away from many humans being required to make a single system operationally relevant.
From a data integration perspective, ‘starting with the CONOP’ is best achieved by defining an end-to-end workflow and considering how data is captured and moved throughout that workflow. This makes it possible to identify how software presents opportunities for acceleration, gathering insights, or doing things differently in their entirety. It requires exploring the inspection problem from end-to-end and establishing a desired and measurable outcome.
Approaching CONOP
At S2 Global, we recognized the clear need to develop a tool to meet the challenge of integrating and managing multiple heterogeneous sensing systems, networks, and databases. We developed a modular, open systems architecture software product that can be customized for specific screening solutions using a set of operational business rules that are defined for each site or system’s needs.
Designed to suit the requirements of small, low throughput, sites as well as large, enterprise- or nation-wide, mission-critical screening needs with high uptime and reliability requirements, CertScan is now a fully productized and supported data integration and inspection workflow orchestration platform that is operationally proven and deployed at scale in over 17 countries and 1 territory.
Having such a code base enables CONOPs that are otherwise unachievable; the consideration of sensing modalities, hardware systems, hardware placement, data flow, system interaction, reporting, monitoring, and human involvement is immediately improved by expanded optionality, automation, and auditability. Such a solution accelerates processes, reduces cognitive burden, creates staffing efficiencies, reduces costs, and improves auditability. It enables faster, more secure, and more efficient outcomes.
Learn more about how S2 Global’s solutions are accelerating secure trade here.
The author, Jeff Goldfinger, is the Director of Enterprise Solutions at S2 Global.