Automation as the main ingredient of customs operations

As the Brexit date approached, Flora Food Group needed to find a way to handle the new requirements. They teamed up with a consultant and approached C4T, which marked the beginning of our journey together. Within 4 months, Flora Food Group fully automated their imports into and exports out of the UK and Ireland, as well as their exports from Germany. Additionally, they retroactively upload Polish customs declarations, as direct integration with Polish customs is not yet available. This hybrid approach enables them to capture the entirety of their customs operations in CAS, serving as a single centralised platform.

“Before CAS, 70% of our customs processes were manual. After switching to using C4T’s customs management solution, we have been able to make huge improvements, where now more than 90% is automated.” said Sophie Lavis, UKI Customs Team Lead at Flora Food Group.

Brexit served as a wake-up call for many companies as it highlighted the importance of customs. Their biggest challenge was getting people to recognise that customs involves more than just creating customs declarations and to understand that the cost of non-compliance to the business is enormous!

“Compliance is one of the main drivers of CAS. We can work on bigger customs projects now since we know our declarations are running in CAS, all automated and fully compliant.” said Sophie Lavis, UKI Customs Team Lead at Flora Food Group.

At the start of the implementation process, Flora Food Group did not yet have the resources to implement API integration. As a result, they began by manually ingesting data and uploading Excel files. This approach provided the flexibility needed to start using CAS immediately and gradually automate more processes over time.

Flora Food Group is utilising the modular, ‘land-and-expand’ approach to CAS, starting with a few flows, then expanding to more flows and countries, and incorporating additional automation possibilities when the time is right and resources are available. Recently, Flora Food Group automated their Master Data integration from SAP into CAS.

“The implementation was real teamwork. Although it was complex at times, it was completely painless. You could feel that both Flora Food Group and C4T teams were super involved and committed. Every time one of our test scenarios worked, I celebrated, as it was bringing us a bit closer to our automation goal piece by piece.” said Sophie Lavis, UKI Customs Team Lead at Flora Food Group.

“We could always reach out to anyone on the team in case of questions. There was an incredible amount of support along the way. The collaboration assured us not to be daunted and to trust the process. We love the human approach of every C4Ter we have interacted with so far.” said Sophie Lavis, UKI Customs Team Lead at Flora Food Group.

Flora Food Group previously relied on brokers for their German flows, with a turnaround time of up to approximately 24 hours per declaration. They couldn’t rely on the brokers’ availability, especially outside standard working hours. With CAS, the average turnaround time for a declaration, from the SAP trigger to the export and even import of goods, is about 22 minutes – this is 65 times faster!

“CAS is not only a huge time-saver. Over the years, using CAS, our costs have dropped massively. By replacing the use of customs brokers with the CAS system, we realise 46% cost savings every year.” said Sophie Lavis, UKI Customs Team Lead at Flora Food Group.

Lately, customs authorities have requested numerous document controls at the port of Dublin. With CAS, Flora Food Group can complete these controls in about 10 minutes, compared to the previous average of 10 working days. CAS enables Flora Food Group to easily pinpoint issues and resolve them swiftly, ensuring that the logistics flow remains uninterrupted.

When asked about the main advantage of CAS, Flora Food Group cited 'centralisation' and 'transparency'. They use CAS to lodge customs declarations in multiple countries and involve people with varying levels of customs knowledge. "CAS turns a very complex process into an intuitive, easy-to-use, always accessible workflow." With all declarations accessible in a single system, Flora Food Group can also automatically generate reports from CAS. They no longer need to build reports from scratch, collect data from multiple sources, or dedicate a full-time employee to this task. With CAS, it's a push of a button, and the report is ready, whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Obviously, the 46% cost savings Flora Food Group realises with CAS year after year is a huge advantage as well, freeing up budgets to focus on other customs related projects.

“I cannot imagine a customs life without CAS anymore. It has been pivotal in my job”. said Sophie Lavis, UKI Customs Team Lead at Flora Food Group.