Update on TSN Approved Changes to its ACE Priorities (eBond, Edits)
In June 2011, the TSN Trade Leadership Committee voted to approve changes to the TSN’s ACE Priorities document (such as accelerating eBond and ensuring summary edits) and ideas for minimizing programming costs.
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CBP had asked the TSN to update its ACE priorities document and suggest cases where future programming might be combined to work as part of existing ACE programming, in order to minimize cost. (See ITT’s Online Archives or 07/13/11 news, 11071328, for BP summary announcing the availability of the list of approved changes.)
Changes in TSN’s ACE Priorities
The Trade Support Network leadership voted in favor, by a vast majority, of accelerating or ensuring the priority of the following features of the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE):
Electronic bond processing. Make electronic bond processing in ACE a higher priority, and include it in the initial deployment of cargo release. The initial focus would be on electronic single transaction bonds (STBs). Once STBs were in place, the filing of continuous transaction bonds (CTB) could be added to the system.
Pluses for electronic STBs would include the possibility of eliminating the requirement for a CTB to participate in Remote Location Filing (RLF) and allowing the use of STBs instead.
One member said that including this process as part of the initial cargo release would “give CBP a very large bang for relatively few bucks.” Another stated that by raising the priority of bond processing, it appears that TSN leadership is agreeing to postpone (or possibility eliminate) a real electronic bond in favor of a scanned image of a bond with a few data elements programmed into ACE.
MMM after cargo release. Develop Multi-Modal Manifest as a separate item after Cargo Release and eBond, which should progress in the order of Air, Rail, Truck, Ocean. (Note that Truck eManifest is done, and the pilot for Rail and Ocean eManifest (M1) is slated to begin in August.)
Include export manifest in MMM. Add export manifest to MMM, as the creation and filing of an ocean manifest is a manual, time consuming process. This prioritizing could leverage other manifest programming and is consistent with current export initiatives.
Retain ACS function until fully working in ACE. Full functionality should be provided in ACE for a particular feature before turning off its function in ACS (the Automated Commercial System), so the trade does not have to deal with two systems.
More entry types, summary edits. Toward that end, the leadership wants to move up in priority (1) adding more entry summary types (currently only “01”, “11”, and “03” (formal, informal, AD/CV) are programmed) and (2) enhanced entry summary edits.
Ideas for Combining Future Programming to Minimize Cost
TSN leaders agreed that it was worthwhile to explore how ACS reconciliation might be accomplished in an ACE Post Summary Correction (PSC) environment. Issues to examine would include the extent of the programming needed, would each line item change require a separate reconciliation entry, etc.
The leadership also agreed that the work done on existing entry types (“01”, “11”, and “03”) should be leveraged to program the remaining entry types. In addition, work on existing manifest (ocean and rail) should be leveraged to begin steps to program MMM and export.
(Also a new proposal that was not discussed would provide programming to cross-reference U.S. export/import transactions, which would be a natural “next step” link once the exports are available in ACE.)
(The Trade Support Network (TSN), which was established by CBP in 1994, is a group of trade representatives (associations, importers, exporters, brokers, carriers, sureties, and others) who provide input into the design and development of Modernization projects, such as ACE. The TSN Trade Leadership Committee is composed of the co-chairs of TSN’s committees.)
See ITT’s Online Archives or 07/18/11 news, 11071821, for BP summary of CBP notice announcing that M1 (eManifest: Ocean/Rail) would begin no earlier than August 1, 2011)
See ITT’s Online Archives or 06/27/11 news, 11062713, for BP summary of meeting topics of the Trade Leadership Council (TLC),which is composed of TSN’s trade co-chairs and ACE trade ambassadors. )
Email documents@brokerpower.com for copy of June 8, 2011 TSN TLC document.