Customs denies that 'archaic' equipment is delaying air cargo

ARCHAIC COMPUTER equipment in Customs at Johannesburg International Airport (JIA) is leading to an abnormal number of rejections of entries submitted by airfreight forwarding agents, according to a major user.
The company is finding about half the floppies it submits each Monday are not being read into the system first-go, and unconscionable delays are occurring in clearing cargo consignments.
One of the company's managers, with responsibility for the dealings with Customs, stressed that the staff in the office do their best to help hurry the entries through. But we can be losing up to 24-hours waiting for this to happen, the source said, and this is a lifetime in airfreight cargo movement.
While Customs generally put the failures down to disc errors, this is not the case, according to another of the company management. On a few occasions now I have tested a number of the rejected discs on my laptop, and they have come up OK, he said. It's the archaic equipment they've got there. It's just not up to the job anymore.
The problem is that all these delays see us incurring storage charges from the airlines. And it's not just us that's getting hit.
To confirm the complaint, FTW approached others amongst the big airfreight agents.
In one case, we were told that problems had occurred, but the failure rate had not been recorded.
However, the spokesman added, any delay in air cargo traffic is a disaster.
In another case, the problem had become so worrying, that the agent had sent down some of its IS (information systems) staff to the airport to sort it out. It's been a lot better in the last week or two since that happened, said the FTW source - although he couldn't identify what had actually been sorted out.
But the Customs IT people are sure it's not a hardware/system problem, according to Gavin Collinet, director of Customs in Pretoria. It's one of those operator, not the machine situations.
The equipment there can handle the whole floppy system, he said. This problem does not relate to the system. We feel that it's a procedural problem, and any concerned agents should see the controller.
JIA is also on the schedule for upgraded equipment - one of the locations to which the successful new installation at the Johannesburg office will flow in due course.
It's on the list for new equipment, Collinet added.