SINGAPORE CUSTOMS: DOING MORE WITH LESS

When the Customs & Excise Department of the Singapore Ministry of Finance was reconstituted as the Singapore Customs (SC), incorporating trade-related units from the International Enterprise of Singapore, its IT Branch seized the opportunity to consolidate various computing resources such as mainframe computers, servers, faxes and service level agreements, at the same time weeding out redundancies in resources. With the aim of maximizing the value of every IT dollar spent, the IT Branch embarked on a year-long initiative tagged "Doing More with Less". The end result: savings of $1.5 million per year for the department's IT operating budget.

Making the dollar stretch
The department used a different perspective to review the capacity requirements for mainframe computing needs. Instead of mapping out projected growth and transaction volume, the department used a phased approach to align to new limits. Minor deductions of computing resources were made gradually and with close monitoring to ensure no major disruption to the business operation and the system performance remains acceptable. This amounted to a cost saving of $1 million.

Instead of purchasing new servers to host applications brought over by the International Enterprise of Singapore, the department re-used, enhanced and made good existing servers to take on the additional loads. This resulted in capital savings of half a million, in terms of cost avoidance to purchase new servers and networking equipment. An additional annual savings was also made from expenses otherwise incurred to maintain and host the new servers.

In addition, the department re-hosted its internal applications and centralised the faxing and messaging system from the previous 4 disparate systems, each on different supporting platforms. This cut down the hosting costs, software licensing and system maintenance costs.

Other than tuning the IT systems, the department also reviewed and consolidated various IT contracts, through revising the supporting service level agreements based on system criticality and availability requirements. This netted substantial saving from the contract costs.

Non-monetary benefits
Besides achieving significant savings, the initiative resulted in improved ICT management and cut short the learning curve for staff who did not have to familiarise themselves with the use and support of new systems, but could instead tap on their existing knowledge for similar applications. This meant improved operational efficiency within the department. All these were achieved without any deterioration in system response to external customers (despite computing resources being reduced by 14%).

Conclusion
Although the initiative did not involve the use of any new or emerging technology, Singapore Customs has creatively pooled its various resources together to bring better cost value to the Government.