Technology

Declarations Platform

This is the engine room behind our services and creates the mainstay of our service product. It features:

• Invoice Compression. We upload invoices into the platform without pre-compression by attributes such as commodity code. This permits a greater level of accuracy and automation, giving us a 'what you see is what you get' declaration with no ‘fudged’ intermediary layer. We process invoices with thousands of products seamlessly, and our business data also extrapolates to that level of detail. Our clients are impressed by the granularity of data and reporting that we achieve.
• We use Directives as an integral tool for our brokers. Our brokers can serve any client as both global and client-specific instructions are captured and visible to our brokers before any declaration is submitted. This integrates with self-checking through machine learning that either identifies deviations from the norm or new business preparation rules that occur over time. The software actively identifies variances from the norm and flags them up.
• In Built Governance. Whoever prepares your declaration is not permitted to submit them. This control point forces peer/manager review and a second set of eyes to audit the declaration before it is submitted to HMRC.
• Machine Learning. When taking on new clients, senior staff train our system with the correct semantics for declaration preparation. This provides extraction of directives and trains the system in automation and expectation. This is our benchmark for declaration preparation; any deviation from what the machine has learned is highlighted for senior staff for review. Either the machine rules require updating (achieved automatically by submission), or an exception has occurred that will be raised back to you.
• Business Process Automation. The declaration platform is fully process-integrated. The team are served a queue of declarations, and all necessary information required for submission is available to hand.
• SharePoint. We use SharePoint as the document repository for all documentation associated with creating the declaration and responses from HMRC. All declarations are supported by a full electronic history of their contributing documents, complemented by a full history of their submission history every step of the way.
• Direct Email Support. Using a structured subject header format, all correspondence associated with a declaration can simply be emailed into the platform.
• Product Libraries. Each client has a bespoke product library steadily built into the platform as declarations are made. This library can highlight potential issues with customs procedure codes/commodity code variances. Any deviation from the product library fires a warning(s) that our brokers must close out before processing the declaration.

Notifications Engine

Progress reporting of declaration preparation and all associated evidence is seamless. Based on the interest you or your supply chain may have, we configure our application to automatically advise you of everything you and your extended team need to know.

Process Task Management Platform

Our Process Task Management platform is the backbone of our operations. All processes defined in our Quality Management System are instantiated in the platform. Across all our operations, we know real-time status and owner. The platform is fully integrated with our clearance inbox, so as soon as a request for a declaration passes initial quality control, it is emailed into this platform and hits the relevant queue for processing.

Control Tower

Our Control Tower supports increasingly advanced direct data integrations with our clients, and opens up 3PL and 4PL capabilities. Based on appetite, this asset provides end-to-end management of activities across the supply chain. Typically, we use this for full-blown services and automated HMRC regime management. Depending on needs, the service can be provisioned either by direct systems integration or controlled emailing.

Automation is key to our services, and we are constantly looking to get our technology to do the work. This ranges from the automated generation of declarations through asset tracking, billing, and the automated issue of relevant status data and supporting documentation to our clients. We prefer our team to be working at capacity delivering rather than administering routine tasks.

Interactive Trackers

Through our operations in declaration preparation, we can use the data we collate to enhance our Process Management Task platform and provide end-to-end tracking of business-critical activities. Generally, these are supported by an API and a mobile application to support the tracking of ships, the status of containers, and direct feedback to truck drivers based on GVMS events.

We are extremely interested in the industry achieving these optimisations, and all ears when it comes to any ideas you may have that can benefit others or optimise a service of ours. We improve our services free of charge in this area. Consider that a truck failing to stop for inspection might cost you 2,500 GBP directly and, if repeated, impact your ability to trade altogether.

Office 365 Integration

We are Microsoft Office 365-based and use Azure Cloud infrastructure to host our services and fully optimise the benefits it brings to our workforce. Our workforce is fully remote, working to reduce overhead and improve our staff’s quality of life and flexibility. We operate extensively in Microsoft Teams to provide chat rooms for our team members and real-time updates on the progression and escalation of issues/meetings of regular targets. All our applications are capable of billboarding notifications to Teams chatrooms so that the team are aware of both human posts and automation driven processes in the background.