E-service for foodstuff importers launched

The Food Import Service is a new e-service implemented by Dubai Municipality in collaboration with the Dubai Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation in order to simplify procedures for local food importers.

"The new e-service will be used by food traders who import foodstuff into Dubai through various entry ports," said Qassim Sultan, Director General of Dubai Municipality, at a press conference yesterday.

He added that the use of this e-service would provide food traders with several benefits. For instance, food traders will be able to submit a request to import foodstuff and check the status of the request round-the-clock, without being restricted by municipality working hours.

The imported consignments can be released by Dubai Municipality inspectors faster through the port, as all the consignment information will be available online to the inspectors before the consignment arrives.

Furthermore, food traders will be able to track the status of consignments through the Internet and they can also download the release certificate from the Internet as soon as it is issued.

Sultan said the e-service was designed in collaboration with the Dubai Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation in order to minimising data entry, whereby the trader will not be required to enter details of each consignment but the information will be automatically extracted from the corporation's system, thus simplifying the process for the customer.

The service also provides advantages for the corporation since the ability to inspect and approve the release of consignments faster will reduce any backlogs in the port.

The e-service will be available to two food traders for one month on a trial basis and will then be gradually rolled out to all food traders in the emirate.

The press conference was also attended by Hussein Nasser Lootah, Assistant Director General for Environment and Public Health Affairs and Head of the e-Government Committee at the municipality, Mohammed AbdulKareem Julfar, Assistant Director General for Technical Services, and AbdulHakim Malik, Director of the Information Technology Department.

Lootah said Dubai Municipality has successfully launched a number of e-government services for the public and for businesses within Dubai since October last year. These e-services are being extensively used by the public and traders. Nearly 30,000 live customer transactions have been conducted online so far.

"The figures indicate an average of 2,000 online transactions a week, 22 per cent of which were processed by the customers during the off-duty hours. This illustrates the high rate of success achieved by the municipality's e-government initiative in saving time, money and efforts for customers as well as the municipality staff," said Lootah.

There are 635 companies registered to use the online services of the civic body. Also, there are 659 business users and 318 public users.

The municipality has conducted more than 110 training sessions to train the internal and external users on how to use the e-Services.