17 May 1999

ACROSS Electronic Release Re-engineering Project

Members are reminded of the memo from Revenue Canada e-mailed on 22 March, entitled "ACROSS Electronic Release Re-engineering Project", that dealt with programming changes that will impact all electronic release clients, including those on CADEX. If the required changes are not made, electronic release transactions will fail on 4 July. Members are strongly encouraged to prepare in advance to make the necessary changes.

The memorandum was revised on 13 May, and has been mailed in hard copy. A copy of this document, from Mr. Paul Miller, Manager, Electronic Commerce Unit, Customs Trade Administration Branch, follows.

Members with questions about the necessary changes to facilitate the migration to a new electronic commerce platform are asked to contact their VAN's or service providers, or the following Revenue Canada personnel: Michelle Dufour at 613-941-0343, or Serge Charette at 613-954-7503.

All EDI ACROSS Electronic Release Production/Test CLIENTS

Subject: ACROSS Electronic Release Re-engineering Project

The Department is currently undertaking the Electronic Commerce Platform (ECP) Re-engineering Project, to improve the processing of EDI messages by making ECP message processing faster, more stable and with an increased fault tolerance. EDI-ACROSS Electronic Release is scheduled for re-engineering on July 4, 1999. In order to provide this improved service to you there are certain changes necessary on the new Customs Electronic Commerce Platform (CECP) which have an impact on you.

The following changes are applicable to EDI ACROSS Electronic Release transmissions only. Note: For testing clients the current testing ECP will not function after June 4, 1999. For production clients, the current production ECP will not function after July 4, 1999. Clients must have these changes ready prior to these dates or your Electronic releases will not be processed. Details regarding our production system outage to effect our system changes will be provided in the near future.

Change #1 – Communication Interface

Clients who are using Value Added Networks (VANs) to connect to Revenue Canada will now have to make small internal changes to connect to a new Revenue Canada mailbox which routes the data to and from the new CECP. Both a TEST and a PRODUCTION mailbox have been established with each one of Revenue Canada's VAN trading partners. The mailbox identifiers are listed in the table in this memo.

Clients who currently transmit release data via the CADEX lines are required to use a new Job Card Language (JCL) stream to connect to the new CECP. See the table and refer to the applicable appendices.

Note that the Accounting Document B3 JCL does not change. Use your existing script for B3 transactions. There are no changes to your printer class or RJE session scripts.

Note that these changes do NOT affect your VAN Release Notification System (RNS) messages or your CADEX Notification of Release messages. Use the same method as now to receive releases.

Change #2 – Error messages

The Department recognizes that in some cases electronic releases are rejected by our translator either for data and/or syntax errors and in these cases it is often difficult for us to determine the exact reason for the reject. Our outbound error response message back to you is sometimes unclear. We are attempting to come up with more precise error messages, to identify the cause of the error and provide this information to you. This information will be contained in the current record(s) that are used to provide current error information and will be FREE TEXT. There are no new segments or records. No programming is necessary on your behalf, however, you will need to handle more precise error responses.

Change #3 – AQ transmissions

Currently section 5.5 (scenario #5) of the PRD states that if you are transmitting the AQ service option (455) you transmit function code 4. Effective July 04, 1999 you will transmit function