Development Of A Risk Monitoring Microservices For Improving Import Inspection - A Case Of Kenya Bureau Of Standards.

Most organizations in private and public sector take a risk-based approach to mitigate any business venture also leveraging on customer satisfaction aligned with quality and keeping costs at bay. The purpose of this study was to investigate if the development of an integrated risk-based microservice can reduce the turnaround time for consignment clearance. Also ascertain whether use of microservices enhances level four Enterprise Resource Planning integration of organizational enterprise systems from a modular approach as compared to a monolithic approach.

The research project study was motivated by the organization approach to migrate from ISO 9001:2008 certified to ISO 9001:2015. As noted, ISO 9001:2015 standard main methodology is risk-based thinking; which is relevant and essential for achieving an effective quality management system at organization level. Employment of risk-based solution in inspection process was to play a crucial role in solving a number of issues. This included ease congestion at the port of entry by increasing cargo throughput, prioritize on entries to inspect based on risk level and save on time and cost as a whole. The specific objectives included identification of the risk attributes to be utilized in the risk matrix, development of an artifact to use in real-time to facilitate inspection process and finally, evaluate whether the artifact was effective for inspection processes.

The research project was based on design research approach whose specific objectives entailed identification of risk attributes as discussed in chapter two. An improved risk monitoring microservices were designed and developed using the identified risk attributes inclusive of the functional and non-functional requirements. The artifact was then deployed on Windows server enterprise where it was utilized to ingest data from third party sources. The third-party sources included the appointed PVOC based in various geographical regions around the globe. Each manifest for entries received was validated based on valid schema and saved to central storage. Additional data was ingested via web service two which was used by the risk monitoring microservice to profile entries with the assistance of a scheduled internal service which flagged various key risk attributes. Finally the risk profiled data was exposed via APIs for web frontend integration and core system integration. The data was used by inspectors to clear entries from stations based on the risk rating.

Results showed that specific research objective one identified risk attributes used in developing a risk algorithm for the research project’s artifact. Specific research objective two was met by development of an enhanced risk monitoring microservice using Vaadin for spring framework. Lastly, research objective three was achieved through testing and evaluating the developed artifact to check whether it is effective for the case of KEBS inspection process. Relative to Melvin Conway's Law, the enhanced risk monitoring microservices was complacent to the inspection process thus adopted to the organization's communication architecture and partly facilitated achievement of its business objective. 

This research project extended and added to literature the concept of microservice utilization in business information systems allowing decomposition of monolith system from an agile perspective, but kept focus on business process objective based on risk-based thinking that is ISO 9001:2015. Also, it enlightened chief technical officers, system architects, developers and software engineers on how microservices development could facilitate continuous development, integration, deployment and monitoring in a repeatable approach. 

As change is inevitable, further research on efficient optimization of risk monitoring microservices can be applied not only on inspection process, but also on integrating various data sources that are siloed further mitigating risk incidents in small and medium sized organization that can range from banking sector to agriculture sector.