Dubai Customs House: Managing business capabilities
Dubai Customs House has set a goal to transform the organization from a traditional customs house to a world-class customs organization -- in the shortest possible period of time. Attaining such an aggressive goal required a new mechanism to help the organization increase its delivery capability and uncover profitable business opportunities.
That mechanism, business capability management, focuses on four aspects of the business: people, process, technology, and information. The intent is to create a more flexible business by planning capability development in advance, with a key emphasis on stakeholders being able to make better-informed decisions. Ultimately, this initiative has helped Dubai Customs House establish itself as the leading customs administration in the region and a leader across the globe.
The EA practice assists the organization in determining business and architectural strategy, including the development of a road map for business transformation and practice modernization. This road map helps determine the scope, focus, and incremental steps necessary to meet new business goals.
The main stages of capability assessment include business "visioning," current state analysis, future state development, gap analysis, and implementation planning. The EA team developed the following deliverables to aid in producing value to the business:
- Capability management framework: The framework defines the method, processes, and tools to enable the organization to assess its capabilities.
- Capability maturity model: This model helps develop the road map needed to improve quality and increase efficiency of the organization, including improvement strategies and higher service quality.
- Capability map: The business capability map is a tool for developing enterprise architecture. The objective is to depict the customs business model in a one-page snapshot that clarifies relationships among different elements of the customs business.
- Capability profiles: These documents identify and organize capabilities, describing them in detail through a common set of attributes that provide a high-level view of how the capability operates.
- Capability assessment questionnaire: Based on the capability maturity model, this document contains questions to validate the quality of services in the organization.
- Capability assessment report: This document contains the formalized findings of the assessment process and includes recommendations for the transformation of business capabilities.
Thanks to this fresh approach, Dubai Customs House has improved service-level maturity by 70 percent and decreased manual activities by 50 percent. The accuracy of reporting has also been vastly improved. Cross-departmental collaboration has nearly doubled, while system efficiency has increased by 30 percent and staff effectiveness has risen by 50 percent. Standards adoption has risen as well.
Identification of process overlap has resulted in substantial cost savings. Dubai Customs merged its inspection function with its declaration management function at its centers, as well as its special tasks function with its intelligence function. The inspection capability was unified across multiple functional areas.
Finally, stakeholders can now access a "single source of truth" for all organizational information through an innovative system dubbed Enterprise Connected View.
Dubai Customs House expects continued, substantial increase in the volume of trade activities. The capability management practice has optimized customs clearance capability, enabling Dubai Customs House to handle the ever-increasing load and sustain itself as a world-class customs administration.
