Customs has become much more digital recently. Many countries have created digital portals to avoid sending and filing paper documents. Declarations for e-commerce and individuals are often automated, requiring little or no action from the declarant. But what about international trade?

Given the number of stakeholders in each transaction, it is a difficult sector to digitize. Each has its own software, document and data formats, and they are very rarely interoperable. The solution for centuries has been to send documents containing information about the goods. The problem is that, because there is no international standard, each company has its own format, and the presentation of documents varies enormously from one supplier to another.

The result is complex documents, which the declarant must decode to check and re-enter the information into his customs software.

In addition to the fact that this manual work is a source of errors and wasted time, it does not do justice to the skill of the customs declarant, whose expertise is not to copy item lines as quickly as possible.

Solutions exist to relieve the declarant. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) or RPA (Robotic Process Automation) can speed up data entry, but not in all cases. The first one requires that the companies concerned validate the investment and the connection, and a bridge is set up between their systems so that they communicate.

This is very interesting for large flows, but SMEs may not have the budget, and the interest is much less for rare or even unique flows.

The second one can automate internal company processes, but it needs its own data, otherwise the system wouldn’t know what it was looking at. And international trade documents are anything but structured.

That leaves intelligent document processing platforms, which allow you to work directly on the documents.

These solutions require the declarant to take action, but they greatly accelerate the retrieval of information from the documents and automate the tasks to be done with this data.

With the proliferation of digital customs portals, there is a lot of talk about going paperless. In reality, documents have simply become PDFs, and declarants still have as much information to enter. RPA, EDI, intelligent document processing platforms, solutions exist to speed up customs clearance, but the sector is not very interoperable and documents remain king.

Article written by Arnaud Doly , Founder & CEO of Nabu