A Mexican national organization that represents the union interests of 38 Customs Associations in the country that integrates more than 880 professionals in foreign trade commerce. Created 60 years ago, the confederation works to support and promote its members in diverse areas through a structure integrated by a committee of custom brokers and a professional team of advisors in diverse specialties

The foreign trade operations in Mexico are declared in the form of Pedimento that includes information on various aspects viz. importer, exporter, countries, articles, tariff, tax etc. This declaration is prevalidated against the custom laws before sending it to the custom house for validation and for further processing. The prevalidation consists of verifying the data declared in the Pedimento for the m-file based on the syntactical, catalogical, structural and normative criteria. The process of Prevalidation is done at each association local to the custom broker. The current system was Client Server based.

The business challenges that Customer was facing:

• Accuracy of validating the Legal Criteria
• Performance
• Legal rule changes were not properly catered to
• Rule change needed source modifications

There was a pressing need to modernize the system and stay ahead of competition.

• The scope of the project was to reengineer the current VB application to J2EE using Java 1.4, JSP, Servlets, Swing, Oracle 9i database and Tomcat Web Server.
• Zensar executed this project using the Solution BluePrint (SBP) Framework. The requirements collected by Zensar team were used as an input for the Solution Blue Print(SBP) Framework.
• Visual models were created and the business logic was extracted out of the requirements; this was then embedded within the models. Java code was generated automatically using Solution Blue Print(SBP), which formed part of application code.

Technology

• Source Prevalidator system in Visual Basic
• New Prevalidator was built with Enterprise Architect, Java 1.4, Swing, Servlet, JSP, HTML, JavaScript and Oracle 9i used
• Zensar’s Solution BluePrint (SBP) Framework for Visual Modeling

Overall activities carried out included

• Re-enginering of the ‘Pre-validator’ application
• Online validation of information entered by the agents/brokers against the database and business rules maintained in the pre-validator rules database.
• Re-creation and re-submission but not reformatting of the M-file.
• Delivery of Customs file by Customer to the Mexican Customs Authority on a periodic basis
• Socket interface to send the file to the Mexican Customs department
• Administration Module and Business Rules Configuration module 
• Receiving feedback from Customs department and disseminating it to the agents/brokers. In this process Customs sends the summary (electronic format) of rejected/accepted files with required reasoning.
• Based on this summary customer sends inputs i.e. acceptance of customs file to brokers or if the file is rejected then request the concerned broker to resend the customs file.
• Secure system to protect the data from intruders

This application includes three major parts as follows:

• Console- Handles the to and fro flow of different types of files
• Rule Validator- Main Rule Engine with its own parser to parse the rules, which are written using the language and grammar define for creation of rules.
• Rule Creator- To create Rules using the grammar and language supported by the Rule Validator.

The value addition from Zensar came in form of activities:

• Zensar developed a rule engine with its own language and grammar to enable user to change the legal criteria as and when they change
• Development of a parser to parse the language, which was defined in the system, and used in creating the rules

• Large improvement in terms of time taken for Prevalidation, which is better than many of customer's competitors. This enabled customer to provide better service to Custom Brokers.
• This new system enables customer to change the legal criterias without even touching the application source code. None of the competitor’s Prevalidator application have this capability