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Challenges
Customs Direct faced several key operational challenges:
- Missed Revenue: Inefficiencies in processing certain complex or one-off shipments, like vehicles and heavy equipment, led to missed business opportunities, especially when they required quick processing.
- Manual Data Processing: Extracting and inputting data from documents like commercial invoices, bills of lading, certificates, and client setup documents in various formats into their operating system and CargoWise required extensive manual effort and was prone to errors.
- Operational Bottlenecks: Customs Direct struggled to scale its operations without adding more staff, driving up costs.
Solution
Customs Direct integrated Reform’s AI-powered data processing automations to optimize the extraction and enrichment of data from documents through their interface and ultimately ending up in CargoWise:
- Automated Data Processing: Reform’s AI automatically extracts critical data for customs filings, and formats the shipment data for integration into CargoWise.
- Organizational Identification and Validation: Reform validated individuals and organizations via Know Your Customer (KYC) checks and shipment data.
- Consolidated Workflows: Reform streamlined Customs Direct’s workflows, enabling the company to reduce shipment processing into a few efficient flows.
Results
By deploying Reform’s automations, Customs Direct achieved impressive results:
- The time spent processing customs filings decreased from 45 – 60 minutes to just 15 minutes, representing a 75% reduction in time spent on each filing.
- Customs Direct expects to see 400% ROI after doubling the processing bandwidth and allocating that effort to other areas in the business.
Looking Ahead
Customs Direct plans to expand its use of Reform into additional areas and the company is confident that Reform will continue to be a vital part of their strategy to scale operations while keeping accuracy and compliance at high levels.
