RILO AP conducted the online Customs Enforcement Network (CEN) Training on 20 June 2023 via Zoom virtual meeting platform. 126 customs officers from 21 member administrations made nominations: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Fiji, Hong Kong of China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, New Zealand, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The CEN training started with an opening remark by Mr. Kyung-Sik CHAE, Deputy Head of RILO AP. In the opening remark, he highlighted the importance of CEN as a global application enabling users to access a great deal of information for analysis of illicit trafficking as well as the importance of data quality.

Following the opening remark and photo session, Mr. Ousmane Coundoul, WCO CEN Programme Manager, delivered his presentation about CEN Data Visualization. The visualization is a WCO initiative, funded by India Customs, to allow the users to know about smuggling trends without having special analytical techniques. The visualization page is accessible from the WCO member site or from the link in the global CEN application. Mr. Coundoul explained how to use the page in detail, demonstrating the actual page by sections, such as overview, RILO section, country profile, or commodity profile.

The following session was about how to input seizure cases into CEN. This session was given by Ms. Jiyeon Bae, CEN Manager of RILO AP, aiming to enhance the understanding of the CEN suite among participants. To start with, she explained an overview of the CEN suite, which consists of three applications: CEN, CENcomm, and nCEN. Then, she demonstrated how to use CEN, explained functions of CEN including library for useful stored documents, and conducted a demo on seizure data entry mentioning some errors or mistakes that are often observed in the process of entering seizure cases.

The last session was trend analysis with the CEN database. It was carried out by Ms. Yuko Watanabe, CEN Manager of RILO AP, and the goal of this session was to create some charts which appeared on the CEN Data Visualization website. First of all, she addressed the search function in CEN where users can search and download the CEN global data. Then, using the downloaded Excel file, she explained how to clean the data, how to create a pivot table and pivot chart, and lastly how to create a dashboard step by step.

During the training, many questions were asked through the chat box. Presentation materials were shared with the participants by email to individual participants. RILO AP has a plan to arrange CEN training once again in the second half of the year for member administrations in the AP region.