For Immediate Release

Washington, DC
October 3,2000
Contact: Bob Foley (301) 562-7790 ext. 12

AESDirect Celebrates a Busy and Successful First Anniversary

One year ago today, the U.S. Census Bureau opened AESDirect, its highly anticipated Free Internet SED Filing Service. "Our first year of operation has been a great success. We have achieved a service uptime of 99.95%, registered over 2,500 companies to use the service, with over 1,200 companies filing every day. AESDirect is currently processing over 100,000 shipments per month; a transaction volume that continues to grow," said Bob Foley. Mr. Foley is President of FCS, the company that developed and operates the service for Census.

As well as its success in attracting users and usage, AESDirect has been significantly enhanced in its first year. The major theme of these changes was to dramatically enhance the interoperability of AESDirect with other software and Internet services and applications.

The ability of AESDirect to receive and process EDI data was dramatically enhanced with the introduction of the capability to receive shipment information prepared in the U.S. Customs Service's Proprietary Data format. "Many companies and software vendors have programmed their systems to be able to produce this data standard. With the introduction of this capability, AESDirect immediately became an AES filing option for these companies", said Foley.

The introduction of the AESWebLink service marked another innovative step for AESDirect. AESWebLink is a plug-in capability to share information between an AESDirect-certified Internet or Windows Desktop application and AESDirect. "AESWebLink is a perfect example of how to use the interoperability and pervasiveness of the Internet, and is a ground breaking example of how to use the Internet to deliver first class B2G application services," said C. Harvey Monk, Jr., Chief, Foreign Trade Division at the Census Bureau. AESWebLink allows certified 3rd party applications to pass data to AESDirect, giving users the convenience of EDI with the realtime response and online error checking of the interactive AESDirect system.

As a testament to their commitment to provide continual service, the excellent operational record of AESDirect notwithstanding, , Census commissioned FCS to implement an independent disaster recovery datacenter for AESDirect. The backup facility will be brought on-line in October of this year and will further guarantee the availability of AESDirect to the trade community.

A key factor in the success of AESDirect has been a major outreach program to Freight Forwarders, Exporters, and suppliers of Export Software and Services. The major element in this effort as been an aggressive ongoing program by Census of regional AES Public Meetings and AESDirect User Workshops. Census is certifying exporters, forwarders, NVOCCs and Carriers to use AESDirect using hands-on exercises in a classroom style environment. Several workshops have already been conducted in New York, Los Angeles, Laredo, and Pittsburgh. Census will conduct further workshops and meetings in Chicago, San Francisco, Miami and Seattle this year. In addition, the introduction of Customs Propriety EDI and AESWebLink and customer service support has played a key role in the way that the International Trade Software and Service companies have embraced AESDirect.

"Not withstanding our successful first year, the Census Bureau is committed to make AESDirect even more useful and effective for the U.S. export trade community. Stay tuned. By the end of this year, we will be introducing additional changes and enhancements… many suggested by the trade community. The most significant of these is a Windows-based stand-alone data entry module to help those companies who would like to enter higher volumes of shipments online. "There is no doubt that in the next twelve months AESDirect will be a key element to help us to meet our goal of all but eliminating the remaining paper SEDs." said Chuck Woods, Assistant Division Chief of the Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Division.

Companies interested in AESDirect should visit www.AESDirect.gov, where they will find everything they need to know about registering and using the service.