Zaizi: Creating a global award-winning customs innovation for Border Force
How Zaizi transformed Border Force’s port scanning operations
Zaizi delivered a user-centred solution that empowers Border Force officers, enables data sharing and paves the way for AI integration. Built using many modern DevOps practices, the solution recently won a prestigious global customs innovation award.
The brief
Border Force scans cargo at ports in the UK. Officers use intelligence to determine high-priority vehicles, trailers or containers to target for scanning. To modernise the operations, Border Force wanted to digitise and transform their freight scanning activities at ports.
The service had to:
- eliminate any remaining paper and manual processes
- allow officers to view scan data remotely and share information easily across ports
- allow senior stakeholders to monitor throughput/efficiency, and use the data for wider reporting
- prioritise user needs and take a user-centric approach to develop an intuitive and efficient service for frontline staff.
The delivery
We took the project through discovery, alpha, and beta, and implemented many DevOps practices along the way. The skills and expertise provided included:
- product management, service design, user research and UX/UI design with rapid feedback loops
- business analysis, process automation and open-source BPM technology
- engineering, architecture, microservices development
- browser-based tools using containerised open source technology
- CI/CD pipelines, cloud-native application and dockerisation platforms.
User-centred approach with continuous delivery
We embedded UCD team members from research, UX and content throughout, while implementing automated testing and deployment pipelines to rapidly deliver improvements based on user feedback.
Our extensive user research helped us pave the way for a smooth roll-out and discover essential operational needs, such as having uninterrupted access with offline mode — a crucial feature that addresses network reliability issues at some remote ports.
Before rolling out to ports, we took part in a Home Office internal assessment to ensure we met the Service Standard and identify any improvements for the next delivery phase.
Ways of working
We took the lead in a complex multi-vendor environment, using Agile methods, DevOps practices and following the Digital Service Standards and accessibility guidelines.
Our team showed technical expertise to overcome challenges and deliver a solution that embedded a partner product and integrated with two other Home Office systems. It was also one of the first projects to build the environments and pipelines on Home Office in-house infrastructure.
We worked collaboratively with in-house teams from the Home Office and DDaT — from Design, Product, Infrastructure and Security to Quality Assurance and Business Change. We also helped build skills and capabilities to support a smooth handover to live service.
The outcome
The application has transformed Border Force’s port scanning operations. It has:
- standardised the workflow and eliminated paper-based, manual processes.
- digitised and automated scanning/examination processes with a comprehensive audit trail
- enabled remote access to real-time scan data, shareable across ports
- established secure, role-based identity and access management
- provide real-time metric dashboarding, trends and scheduled reporting of operational and performance data.
- received positive feedback from frontline officers who find it intuitive, user friendly, and seamlessly integrated with wider Home Office systems.
- create a foundation for future technology integration — Zaizi has already investigated how AI can further improve operations
Global recognition
Border Force won a prestigious Global Customs Innovation Award for the solution. The award highlights cutting-edge solutions and forward-thinking innovations that address the evolving challenges customs administrations face worldwide.
“Zaizi has been great with the day-to-day interactions between themselves and our project team. They understood the brief and worked quickly to establish user needs. The solution has landed well with our users, demonstrating the work put in to get us to this point” - Senior Border Force official
Chad Bond is Zaizi’s Director of Strategy and Innovation. Zaizi designs, builds and sustains user-centred and secure digital government services. The company is a finalist in Computing’s DevOps Excellence Awards.