Industry: transportation of agricultural products
The problem
Interfrigo needs to create customs bills for all its transports directed in EU and non-EU countries. The generation of such documents takes place using a specific software for the customs management, not integrated with the company ERP.
Before Station, the staff had to manually check every single invoice intended to the end customer and to group by type on a spreadsheet goods to be shipped (indicating amounts, weights calculated at the moment, number of packages, producer and recipient).
All the data obtained were then manually entered into the customs management software, along with data regarding the plate of the vehicle responsible for the shipping and various certificates required for the transport (some of these certificates must be enclosed if the transport includes particular types of goods ).
After entering all this data, the dedicated management system generates the customs bill for shipping.
This process, long and expensive, required that there were at least two people devoted to this type of operations.
The solution offered by Arket
With Station, the grouping of the goods has been automated, as well as checking on mandatory certificates and their inclusion.
In particular, with regard to the automatic grouping of goods, Station performs a mapping of the received invoices in PDF format and uses a dictionary that translates the various descriptions of the goods in the invoice in its official nomenclature.
The dictionary is self powered, so if Station finds descriptions of goods not foreseen and therefore not in the dictionary, these are automatically included into the dictionary, and its decoding is prompted to the user.
Through Station Client, the user has then the ability to view and control the document and the groupings made automatically by Station.
When it is necessary to create the customs bill, the user must enter through the Station Client only some data that are not recoverable in an automated way (the license plate of the vehicle and some codes relating the route that the vehicle will travel). At that point it will generate an XML file that will be used by the software for the generation of customs bills to produce the official document.
Users will find precompiled customs bills and should simply validate the entry.
Station can help the user by automating what previously resulted to be a long manual work of cataloging and grouping of items to be shipped.