WHEN DIGNITARIES MEET: World Customs Organisation chairperson Pravin Gordhan (second from left) greeting Union Minister of State for Finance S.S. Palanimanickam at the valedictory function of a meeting in Bangalore on Saturday. (From left) Revenue Se cretary K.M. Chandrasekhar, Secretary-General of the World Customs Organisation Michel Danet and Central Board of Excise and Customs Chairman M. Jayaraman are seen. — Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

BANGALORE: Outsourcing has become a necessity in the Customs Department to meet the expectations of trade and industry. But it is the task of the department to determine the boundaries of outsourcing, Union Minister of State for Finance S.S. Palanimanickam has said.

"What must be done inside the organisation and what must necessarily be outsourced must be decided from within the organisation," the Minister said in his concluding remarks at the international conference on "Outsourcing and off-shoring: A challenge for customs" organised by the World Customs Organisation here on Saturday.

The department should define the services and service levels to be delivered to the end-user by the vendor to whom the job has been outsourced. This process would necessarily have to be through a re-engineered business process established through extensive consultation with stakeholders, he added.

He allayed fears that outsourcing and off-shoring may lead to loss of knowledge capital or institutional skill. The core functions of the department could not be outsourced. The customs officer would continue to play a pivotal role in protecting the interests of the country and its security and ensuring economic and public health of the nation, besides collection of revenue, he added.

To leverage IT to the maximum, it would be necessary to reengineer its business processes, concentrate on those processes that relate directly to its core competence and separate the support functions that could be outsourced, he said.

The Minister said Indian Customs was at a juncture where it was attempting to achieve a transformation using information and communication technologies. In this exercise, the customs was looking at organisational structures appropriate for the transformation and the internal skills needed to carry out these changes.

M. Jayaraman, Chairman, Central Board of Excise and Customs, said the Customs Department had started the reengineering of its work culture to strike a balance between its twin roles of enforcement and trade facilitation.

Over 70 customs administrations and a large number of businessmen, legal experts and professionals from a cross section of the IT industry took part in the interactive sessions on various facets of IT outsourcing in the customs domain.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail