EDS Wins 2007 Infoworld 100 Award for PCIT System
20 Dec 2007
EDS was recognized with a 2007 InfoWorld 100 Award for its work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). The EDS-developed Phytosanitary Certificate Issuance and Tracking (PCIT) system was named one of the best IT projects of the year.
Each year, InfoWorld celebrates 100 IT organizations that have made the best use of technology in pursuit of business goals. Whether ushering legacy systems into the agile era or revolutionizing how their companies leverage technology to meaningful ends, this year’s winners are both inspiration and proof that striking a new path in IT can reap deep organizational rewards, InfoWorld wrote in its Nov. 26 issue.
EDS helped develop PCIT to ensure adherence to plant and plant product exporting regulations worldwide in conjunction with the USDA. PCIT is a Web application that utilizes an N-tier architecture to expose Web services from behind a firewall.
“This project has become very visible at the highest levels of USDA,” said EDS Account Manager Bob Hersh. “The data available for the first time shows export patterns and is useful in international negotiations. Under the direction of APHIS-Plant Protection and Quarantine program managers Alison Young and Christian Dellis, along with the phytosanitary field community at large, EDS designed the system to meet the ever changing requirements demands. The system has done a lot to improve the overall process to produce these certificates.”
“The field community itself is growing leaps and bounds,” Hersh continued. “By year-end, PCIT will have produced in excess of 100,000 certificates and next year we expect that to double. This represents a dollar value in the billions for our U.S. exports.”
Approximately 2,000 county, state and federal officials and 4,000 exporters currently use the system to create and track phytosanitary certificates. Since PCIT went live in 2006, more than 110,000 certificates have been produced with a product value in the billion of dollars. PCIT replaced a manual process previously administered by several, disparate homegrown applications spread across numerous government offices.
Read the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection (APHIS) Case Study File Is Not Found