Case Study: Bureau of Customs of the Philippines achieves rapid customs digitization and major cost savings with Amazon Web Services

Bureau of Customs of the Philippines - Customer Case Study

The Bureau of Customs (BOC) of the Philippines, established in 1902 with about 3,500 employees across 70+ ports and handling roughly 12,000 import/export transactions daily, faced slow, paper‑based processes that took three to four days per transaction and created delays and opportunities for corruption. After the 2016 Customs Modernization and Tariff Act (CMTA) mandated digitization, the BOC planned a major modernization of import clearance but lacked cloud experience and in‑house skills.

BOC chose Amazon Web Services for cost, security and global credibility and—together with Beacon Solutions and AWS Professional Services—built an Advanced Manifest System (AMS) in a dedicated VPC using EC2, EBS and S3, deploying production-ready resources within three months. The AMS enables preclearance and payments up to 35 days before arrival, 24-hour post‑departure review, greater transparency for other agencies, reduced corruption risk, and far lower infrastructure costs (AWS provides 128 cores for under one‑tenth the cost of the planned on‑premises 64‑core data center), while accelerating compliance with CMTA and future cloud adoption.

Bureau of Customs of the Philippines

Dennis Reyes

Deputy Commissioner