The purpose of a Single Window is for a Country to promote the secure flow of trade, a flexible, one-stop-shop electronic platform that eliminates redundant reporting and processing between Customs and the Government Agencies, and promotes border cooperation and interoperability, by seamlessly integrating all relevant Country’s stakeholders into one single platform.
THE NEED FOR A SINGLE WINDOW
A Single Window is defined as an electronic facility which allows parties involved in trade and transport to lodge standardized information and documents with a single entry point to fulfill all import, export and transit-related regulatory requirements (Recommendation and Guidelines on establishing a Single Window, United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business – UN/CEFACT).
According to UNECE recommendation 33, the Single Window is an Automated Information Transaction System model, a paperless environment through which a trader can submit electronic trade declarations to the various authorities for processing and approval in a single application.
Following this approach, approvals are transmitted electronically from governmental authorities to the trader’s computer. Moreover, fees, taxes and duties can be computed automatically and directly paid by the trader or even automatically deducted from his bank accounts (subject to legal compliance and technical requirements).
QUIDGEST’s SINGLE WINDOW FOR TRADE
Quidgest’s proposal for a Single Window is a modular web-based platform, accessible through a Public Portal, built around a core management engine, comprising a document management solution coupled with process design and management tool, connecting all regulatory, border inspection and control agencies via an Integration Hub, and facilitating interoperable decision making for commercial border processing. This core engine includes functions for the vast trading community (e.g. importers, exporters, brokers, shippers, freight forwarders, courier), with specific profiles to be defined and managed under the platform.
Registered users and Organizations, once authenticated in the Public Portal, are presented with a personalized environment where they can apply for a License, Permit, Certificate or Other (LPCO) control document, manage the processes they are entitled to (initiate and follow existing processes, get notifications and messages regarding their processes), check status on LPCOs (approved, not approved, canceled, revoked, etc.), import and export data, pay their taxes, when required, obtain relevant information on the managed environment and get specifically designed reports to control their interests.
SEW CORE
The Process tool allows the administrators of the Single Window to design the processes, a flexible and intuitive tool providing complete autonomy to change existing processes or create new ones when new working procedures are necessary.
The underlying workflow engine provides for the execution of the defined business processes, relying on human interaction and automatic functionalities, managing the data and following the procedures that respond to the needs of the various roles and requirements of the trading business and community.
ANALYTICS
Analytics is an important module of the Single Window, responsible for gathering and modeling data for reporting purposes, including AI and discovery models to support further analysis and promote high level and sophisticated decision making in the platform, including real-time analytics, decision automation (using specific decision models, predictive analytics and machine learning) and decision support for knowledge workers, driving improvements in the execution of a particular process instance or case.
The reporting tool relies on specifically designed data models allows the definition of KPIs and their aggregation into dashboards, along with the provision of AI Pattern discovery mechanisms for data profiling, reporting features, faster experimentation, with visualizations, statistical functions and calculations across broad datasets, and ability to derive answers on the fly through the rapid recombination of fields, delivering decision insights whenever required.
The reporting tool can also be used as a self-service and enterprise analytics tool, turning data into insights across the whole organization at scale, increasing the value of data in the Data Warehouse.
ADMINISTRATION
All the solutions developed by Quidgest have an administration web portal, aggregating different Administration requirements, only accessible to Administrator Profile users. Administrators have the ability to manage access rights and privileges by individual, group, role or segment. Security, access control and application performance management are relevant parts of this Administration Module, other than normal configuration and backup tools.
Except for public pages, access control to an application is done through a login and password, implementing a mechanism to control access to the user’s identity. Only users previously defined through the administration features will have access to use the application, or parts thereof, according to previously defined profiles also. The system provides different access levels and user profiles, making arrangements for differential access to recorded information, in accordance with the defined user profiles. Each profile/user group will match different permissions in accessing data or application functionality.
How we do it: Model Driven Development with Genio
Genio is Quidgest’s model-driven (enhanced low-code for complex solutions) development platform built around data and usage patterns, continuously improved to cope with the quick evolution of technology and business requirements. Defining a model component in Genio (e.g. a list, a column, a form, a button) equals to write thousands of code lines. Within Genio, models are always partnered with artificial intelligence allowing to quickly transform each model into valuable high-performance software.
Genio has been used for more than 30 years in the continuous development of software solutions around the world, by Quidgest and QuidNet partners.
As opposed to traditional manual programming, Model Driven Development and Artificial Intelligence are a proven approach to the challenges of quickly building robust and complex software solutions, with high levels of proficiency and quality. The great advantage of using Genio, however, is the fact that the generated code uses standard programming languages (C++, C#, T-SQL, Javascript, HTML 5, CSS), well-structured and thoroughly commented, which allows any programmer to work with this basis and continue the development, without requiring Genio. The generated code is independent from Genio, the platform that created it, and can be worked on in any modern IDE.
Finally, each Genio pattern includes the correspondent generation process, through inference, translating the model into the solution source code.