Indonesia Directorate General Customs and Excise to Adopt IBM and Maersk’s TradeLens Blockchain

IBM Indonesia together with A.P. Moller – Maersk and The Indonesia Customs and Excise Department, which sits under the Ministry of Finance, announce their pilot collaboration to use blockchain enabled ‘TradeLens’ platform in Indonesia after several months of its first implementation phase announced at the end of last year. Indonesia Customs and Excise Department is the third government agency in Southeast Asia to use the platform.

‘TradeLens’ is a digital global trade platform that enables more efficient and accurate container tracking and information sharing among platform members. The TradeLens platform, jointly developed by A.P. Moller – Maersk and IBM, digitalizes formerly paper-based shipping processes, resulting in instantaneous and immutable end-to-end data.

Mr. Achirul Djamal - Country Manager Cross Industry, IBM Indonesia; Mr. Agus Sudarmadi - Director of information Indonesia Customs and Excise; Mr. Tan Wijaya - President Director IBM Indonesia

By digitalizing shipping processes – formerly paper-based processes – TradeLens will provide the Indonesia Customs and Excise Department an automatic and immutable tracking tool which will lead to a more secure, transparent, efficient and simpler workflow, with near real-time information sharing from a diverse network of ecosystem members.

The Indonesia Customs and Excise Department is working on expanding the National Logistic Ecosystem (NLE) which will enable both demand and supply sectors of the logistic community to meet and collaborate effectively. Using a system called CEISA 4.0 (Customs Excise Information System and Automation), they plan to expand NLE to bring together importers and exporters to collaborate and share information with logistic providers.

Authorities will now be able to receive shipping data as soon as containers leave the port of origin. This will give the Customs and Excise Department more time to prepare to receive shipments, thereby enabling more efficient and thorough fraud and forgery inspections as well as more consistent and transparent revenue collection processes.

Mr. Agus Sudarmadi, Director of Customs and Excise Information said, “The supply chain is an important factor in managing the logistic costs and Indonesia logistics costs are relatively higher compare to other countries in South East Asia. TradeLens will help bring further visibility, predictability and security to us and will be a real asset for trade and transport facilitation, making Indonesia the preferred logistics and transport gateway in this region. It will also enable us to fulfill our mission to facilitate trade and to promote national logistics systems as well as contribute to the development of the national economy while meeting most up-to-date standards set by the World Customs Organisation (WCO.”

Tan Wijaya, President Director of IBM Indonesia said ,“We believe that TradeLens and the implementation of blockchain technology in various forms will benefit all stakeholders in the entire logistics ecosystem and drive the modernization of trade at all levels. We also hope other industry will soon realize the need of Blockchain adoption which can help businesses to redefine their relationships in the market through increase trust, transparency, and newfound collaboration.”