Federal Ministry of Finance, Germany

Story Details

Prior to the ATLAS system, German customs agencies had two IT and paper-supported customs processes. With only 80 customs offices equipped to handle them, customs processing was slower than desired. In addition, certain customs procedures were not supported in the IT system.

This drove the implementation of the new ATLAS system to bring automation and high availability to more offices across Germany, as well as connect with the European Union’s comprehensive customs and tariffs database that is updated daily and is accessed through a Web browser. This database codes all goods handled worldwide and governs customs regulations associated with them. It is thus the basis of calculation for all German customs offices and is essential because it enables German agencies to carry out customs procedures more accurately and more rapidly, thus minimizing wait time.

The parties responsible for ATLAS agreed from the start that they needed a secure, scalable and high-availability infrastructure solution, and they did not have these capabilities in their existing systems. So, the team designed a new three-tier mirroring system architecture with Web browsers leveling the first tier. Approximately 30 Sun Fire V480/V490 servers link the Web browsers to Web and applications servers. Behind this, there are at total of 6 Sun Fire 15K and Sun Fire E25K servers functioning as database servers. Data is stored on 4 Sun StorageTek 9990 and 9980 systems at two locations approximately 10 kilometers apart and Sun StorageTek 6540 arrays for disaster recovery. The Sun Fire servers are running the Solaris 10 Operating System for improved performance, stability and security. The storage systems are connected to the Sun Fire servers with 4 McData Director Class Switches. Data is replicated between the Sun storage systems using Sun StorageTek 9900 TrueCopy Remote Replication and Sun StorageTek 9900 ShadowImage In-System Replication software. In addition, Sun StorageTek QFS software supports file sharing and Sun StorageTek Operations Manager storage area management.

The ATLAS software consists of participant software designed by external suppliers and the exceedingly complex customs software, which includes the electronic tariff, duty rate assessment and master data components. This customs software was developed by Materna in cooperation with the Center for Information Processing and Information Technology of the Federal Ministry of Finance (ZIVIT).

In November 2001, the first ATLAS server began a load testing procedure that reproduced the work of 300 customs officers on a Sun Enterprise 10000 server. In the summer of 2002, Sun Fire 15K servers became operational and the transition from pilot to production systems was gradually completed, leveraging the result of the load tests to fine-tune the solution. There are now approximately 425 customs posts throughout Germany working with ATLAS. The infrastructure was operational six months ahead of schedule, and this accomplishment is largely due to the cooperation between software developer Materna and ZIVIT.

Thanks to ATLAS, customs clearances can now be completed more accurately and much faster than before. ATLAS makes it possible to sometimes have empty waiting rooms at customs checkpoints and to see only those people who it is really necessary to see. The communications route of a single message is often no more than 3 seconds, and a complete customs declaration is generally processed in 15 minutes. Paper is only used for exceptions with controlled or restricted items. And the automation has made it possible to reduce staff by about 700 employees. Based on these positive experiences, ATLAS is being expanded with additional customs processing functions.