KRA has adopted several innovations in the financial year 2021/22, in a bid to optimize the Refunds and Air Cargo business processes.

The objective was to improve processing turnaround of the 2 focus areas:

1. Refunds BPR Innovations
2. Air Cargo Clearance BPR Innovations

A comprehensive root cause analysis was conducted to establish factors resulting to the inefficiencies and long turnaround times for the processes. The below were identified as some of the customer pain points, process bottlenecks and gaps impacting the processes:

Refunds Pain Points

The refunds pain points identified were loss of debt reports that were manually shared leading to prolonged back and forth between debt and refunds team, tedious and error-prone cross checking of manual checklists for refunds validity and manual verification of green channel applicants, all these affecting the refunds overall SLAs.

Air cargo process pain points

The identified Air cargo process pain points include losses incurred by traders (especially for perishable goods) due to delays in the clearance process, high storage charges incurred by importers due to delays in clearance, delays in permit approvals by Partner Government Agencies, tedious/inefficient payment process and delay in payment processing due to system issues and delays in goods verification, which is done at different times by the respective PGAs instead of joint verification.

Business Process Innovations

The business process re-engineering and the business teams implemented the below innovative initiatives as process improvement interventions for both the refunds and air cargo processing:

• Automating refunds debt report request process workflows to create tasks visibility and track service level agreement timelines
• Use of online repositories towards paperless processes and increase in access and control of refunds debt reports, this has eliminated the loss of manual debt reports.
• Use of automated checklist and risk profiling technologies to improve case selection and processing to reduce the manual review of checklist and manual identification of green channel claimants.
• Use of agile methodologies and best practices and tools in business process re-engineering to simplify and create visibility of the authority’s processes to enhance compliance
• Development and implementation of SLA for Cargo clearance by PGAs
• Documentation of an Incident and change management process including an Escalation matrix to resolve customer complaints
• Setup and Operationalization of a joint KRA and Kentrade Contact center to resolve customer issues to eliminate disjointed verification by the PGAs
• Implementation of direct release of consignments with pre-importation permits without a 'hold' in the KESWS system Except for those flagged by the Risk Management Engine.

Benefits of Process Innovations

The benefits realized from the above implemented interventions include:

• Improved Refunds processing rate due to the streamlined requests for debt status reports. (May 2022 SLA: 66 days against Target of 90 days)
• Process visibility: 100% of debt report status requests done on the implemented platform, enhancing tracking movement debt status report requests
• Ease of green channel claimants
• Improved access and security of debt status reports repository
• Automated management report reducing time taken to prepare, consume and make decisions
• Automated classification of refunds claimants into the different processing channels
• Expected reduction in the time taken (from Avg 11days to less than 48hrs) to clear Air Cargo thus reduced losses by traders
• Expected reduction of customer complaints by 20%

The continuous process analysis by the Business Analysis and Quality Engineering team has established further improvement opportunities, including iTax enhancements, that will form part of the financial year 2022/2023.