The purpose of the tender is to provide a platform that will enable the Danish Customs Agency to become compliant with the Union Customs Code (hereafter UCC) according to the deadlines in the EU Commissions Multi Annual Strategic Plan (MASP). To ensure compliance with UCC the customer will through this tender procure a declaration management solution (hereafter the Solution) and implement the functionality and integrations to support import declaration processes. The solution is expected to be implemented according to deadlines in the MASP. The customer expects the supplier to have in-depth knowledge in the customs domain and especially of the UCC and MASP. The customer will use an agile approach for implementation with close collaboration and co-location at the customer location. The tender also includes additional services including training, hyper care, further development, changes, maintenance, support and operations of the solution.
The customer’s strategy is that the future solution should be based on an existing standard software (commercial off the self-software) in the form of a declaration management system in use by other EU countries to support UCC compliance in import, export and transit processes to minimize project risk and timeline. The solution must be able to support both EU requirements and national business requirements. To achieve this the customer expects the functionality to support import, export and transit processes to be further developed and/or adjusted in order to meet the customer’s business needs to the extents that this is not already supported in the current functionality of the standard system. The solution should also be able to support the functionality of export and transit declaration processes, but implementation of these processes is not included in the initial implementation part of this tender. However, it is the customer’s intention to support the import processes through a minimum implementation based on the requirements in the UCC and necessary national business requirements. It is essential that the solution is flexible to ensure a future-proofed system that can enable the customer to effectively implement changes and additional functionality in lifetime of the solution. A major goal of acquiring a declaration management platform is a high degree of reuse of integrations and data across the declaration processes for import, export and transit.
In order to implement the functionality for import the solution should support the following procedures under which goods may be placed in accordance with the UCC; release for free circulation and special procedures together with temporary storage.
The scope of the solution also includes implementation of several integrations. The solution must be able to integrate to EU customs systems as well as several national systems within the Danish Tax Authority and other relevant systems. The number of integrations that must be implemented during the initial implementation part of this tender is 25 whereas 6 of them are integrations to EU-hosted customs systems and the rest of them are to national systems. The customer expects integrations to relevant EU custom systems to be available as part of the offered standard software.
The supplier is also expected to work closely with other suppliers of the customer working on other parts of the UCC program.
Additional services in the tender apart from the implementation of import functionality and integrations includes training, hyper care maintenance, support (both internal and external users, in close collaboration with the Customer) and operations of the solution throughout the agreement. Operations services initially covers operations of the solution including import and later also operations of export and transit when functionality to support these are developed. Operations services cover environments from development to production, hence establishment and operations of development, test and production environments with required hardware, software and security.
The annual load the solution must support (across import, export and transit) is estimated to be around 19 500 000 declarations corresponding to approximately 78 000 000 goods items. It is essential that the Solution can support and scale to the need of capacity in terms of concurrent active users and amount of transactions. The main body of declarations will be received electronically from the companies through a gateway. The main body of users for the solution will be at the customs agency, but also users from (smaller) companies. It is expected that the number of received declarations, etc. will increase significantly over the years partly due to ongoing implementation of export and transit and partly due to upcoming legislative changes e.g. Brexit, changed limits for submission of a declaration and centralized clearance, etc.