Australian Customs have contacted AFIF to see if we can engender some further interest amongst industry to participate in a one day exercise, to be held in late November, to test the ICS Business Continuity Plans (BCP). They have advised that this particular exercise will concentrate on air and export cargo.
You may have already seen the following invitation sent to ICS registered companies:
ICS User,
As your company has been involved in an actual Integrated Cargo System (ICS) outage or shown interest in testing Business Continuity Plans (BCPs), Customs and Border Protection would like to invite you to take part in a national exercise to test ICS BCPs. The exercise is planned for late November/early December and will be conducted over a full day. Industry participants will only be required for up to 3 hour.
The exercise will involve the simulation of an outage to the ICS, invoking BCP's to test not only Customs and Border Protection Service's BCP's but Industry's preparedness in the event of an outage in the future.
The format of the exercise will consist of Urgent Customs Clearance (UCC) and ICS outage scenarios. Customs and Border Protection has run similar exercises which have been well received and viewed as a valuable learning tool by participants from industry.
In order to replicate a real life end-to-end scenario we will be incorporating representatives from the air cargo and export sectors of Industry as well as the Custom and Border Protection and AQIS involved in the reporting and clearance of cargo.
The exercise will cover end-to-end business continuity procedures including:
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Customer Information and Support Centre client assistance
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processing of regional releases of held cargo
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receipt of electronic contingency transactions at regional counters
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regional processing of electronic contingency transactions.
Each step involved in the process will be evaluated Independently.
Once nominated contact will be made to arrange any pre test validations you would like to undertake in preparation for the exercise.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact:
John Cullen| Manager Governance| Cargo Division
Australian Customs and Border Protection Service
P: 02 6229 3574| F: 02 6274 4992 | M: 0414 755642
e: john.cullen@customs.gov.au
