Case study

90-Second Declaration: Full Customs Clearance Automation

Stack

Golang (Go), MongoDB, REST APIs, GraphQL, NATS, gRPC, Angular, RxJS, Nx

DURATION

3 years

TEAM SIZE

3 Full-Stack Engineers, 1 Backend Engineer, 2 QA Engineers, 1 Data Analyst, 1 Project Manager

Key Results & Value:

Processing Efficiency: Customs clearance declarations, which previously took hours of manual effort, are now drafted and pre-processed in less than 90 seconds, achieving an estimated 90% reduction in processing time per declaration.
Operational Availability: The cloud-native architecture provides users and partners with 24/7 accessibility and high reliability, moving away from traditional broker hours and ensuring 99.9% uptime.
Compliance & Risk Reduction: Seamless, complex integrations with all critical government systems (including CDS, CCS-UK, CNS, and DEFRA) ensure 100% data compliance and full auditability for every transaction.
Cost & Overhead Reduction: By unifying fragmented internal processes and automating administrative logistics, the platform is projected to reduce overall administrative overhead and operational costs by over 30%.

A business workflow management startup, in partnership with a major telecommunications partner for its logistics solution.

The startup identified critical pain points in traditional business operations and customs clearance:

For Business Process Management: Many organizations struggled with inefficient, fragmented internal processes. This led to wasted time, increased operational costs, and a lack of data-driven insights for improvement. The need was for a unified platform to model, automate, and monitor workflows
For Logistics Automation: International trade was plagued by manual, time-consuming, and costly customs clearance procedures. Exporters, importers, and intermediaries faced significant administrative burdens, potential delays, and a lack of real-time visibility, leading to supply chain disruptions and financial drains. The challenge was to create an automated, expert-driven solution for customs processes.

Business Process Management Redefined:

This powerful BPM platform empowers organizations to achieve peak operational agility through:

Process Modeling & Automation: A user-friendly interface allows businesses to visually map out their workflows and automate repetitive tasks, ensuring consistency and accuracy.
Performance Monitoring & Optimization: The platform provides real-time tracking of process performance, identifying bottlenecks and offering data-driven insights for continuous improvement.
Collaboration & Communication: Facilitates seamless team collaboration with integrated communication and document-sharing features throughout the process lifecycle.

Automated Customs Clearance for Global Trade:

This innovative platform transforms complex customs procedures into a simple, efficient process:

Automated Declarations: Users can send commercial invoice details via email or API. The platform then validates the data against extensive business rules, pre-processes documents, and drafts customs clearance declarations in less than 90 seconds.
24/7 Availability: Provides continuous service, eliminating reliance on traditional broker hours.
Data Protection & Auditability: Ensures high-level data security and provides full auditability of all customs processes.
End-to-End Visibility: Offers complete transparency across the supply chain with email notifications on declaration status, enabling real-time tracking.
Multi-Modal & Commodity Support: Handles various freight types and a wide array of commodities for both UK imports and exports.

The development of these platforms presented significant challenges:

Enormous Data Volumes: Managing and processing large volumes of transactional and historical data requires robust database solutions and optimized data handling.
Government System Integrations: The logistics platform demanded complex integrations with numerous critical government systems, including CDS, CCS-UK, CNS, MCPIPAFFS, and DEFRA, ensuring data accuracy and compliance for customs declarations.
Extensive Business Rules: Maintaining and updating a vast and intricate set of business rules across development, testing, and production environments, tailored for each customer’s specific import/export needs, was a continuous challenge.