Expediting Imports with Automation

Our client, one of the largest chemical manufacturers in the world, was facing an issue at their foreign trade division, incurring on an excessive number of hours and with errors, running the risk of incurring on penalties and even a potential halt on their imports/exports, which could translate on a stop to their production with the consequent impact on client’s relationships and revenue loss that could have impacted their bottom line.

Our team partnered with the foreign trade division to work on the solution, and applying our Six Sigma methodology, we identified that the main opportunity was on automating the instruction letters for brokers process.

Our team of experts developed a robust automated process….

Information was received from SAP and then the application divided the data depending on the custom from which the merchandize entered the country so that it could be better analyzed and visualized.

Then some dates were calculated to know when should the merchandize get to its warehouse.

Also, some calculations were made so that all data was uniform because there were products that were measured by tons and others by any sort of package. This had to be solved so that the instruction letters were written correctly.

After this, color alarms were activated to inform the user where there was a problem with dates and documentation to be solved so that there was no delay on the process.

Finally, the instruction letters were created automatically with the exact information needed for each broker. Optionally, the user could allow the application to send automatically the letters to the brokers via email.

The application was left with the same characteristics as the original process but all parameters are editable so that user can adapt it to changes in processes.

The combined effort resulted on reducing the time that the merchandize was at the border, generating to the Company important cost reductions, as all information was accurate and in place when it was required by the broker. Therefore, the products were delivered on time to customers, increasing Customer Satisfaction index, which impacted earnings due to increasing or maintaining sales.