5x faster customs declarations with 30% lower compliance costs

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H.Essers, one of Belgium’s largest logistics providers, has been a key player in the industry for nearly a century. However, the modern customs landscape presents significant challenges, particularly following Brexit. With customs volumes increasing by over 40%—reaching 110,000 documents in 2023—the customs team faced severe time constraints and staffing shortages.

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Challenge

Recruiting skilled customs declarants has proven to be a persistent challenge, as the profession remains a bottleneck in the industry. Meanwhile, manual data entry for declarations remained an inefficient and error-prone process, with employees spending extensive time extracting information from various documents and re-entering them into
customs systems.

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"Work faster and more efficient with Customaite"
Wim-Gijbels
Wim Gijbels

Business Unit Manager Customs & Forwarding

Solution

H.Essers sought an innovative solution to streamline its customs operations while maintaining accuracy and compliance. Customaite’s AI-driven platform provided the answer.

How it works

  1. Customers submit various documentation, including invoices, packing lists, and freight documents.
  2. The AI-powered system of Customaite processes these documents, extracting and structuring the relevant data.
  3. The AI automatically populates customs declarations, reducing manual effort and minimising errors.
  4. A customs expert at H.Essers reviews, validates, and finalises the declaration, ensuring accuracy and compliance.

Customaite’s intuitive and user-friendly interface immediately resonated with H.Essers’ core value of simplicity. The seamless integration into their workflow made adoption smooth, allowing declarants to work more efficiently without disrupting existing processes.

Partnership

H.Essers views its relationship with Customaite as a true partnership rather than a conventional vendor-client arrangement. Customaite closely aligns with H.Essers’ entrepreneurial mindset, offering proactive support and demonstrating a strong ‘can-do’ attitude. The collaboration is founded on shared objectives of efficiency, usability, and continuous improvement, ensuring that the solution evolves in line with H.Essers’ needs.

Following the success of this implementation, H.Essers is already considering a similar deployment for its forwarding operations, aiming to extend the efficiency gains achieved in customs declarations to other key business processes.

Results

  • Significant time savings: Tasks that previously took hours are now completed in minutes.
  • Better use of resources: Employees now have more time to focus on high-value activities such as customer support, internal knowledge sharing, and ongoing training.
  • Continuous AI improvement: Customaite’s AI is now achieving an 89% accuracy rate, with performance improving each month as the system learns from human validation.

How Customaite made the difference  

Beyond technology, Customaite brings a unique blend of human-assisted AI, a user-friendly approach, and a commitment to partnership. The intuitive platform allows declarants to focus on their expertise while AI takes care of repetitive data processing. By working closely with H.Essers, Customaite ensures that innovation translates into real-world efficiency.

Experience Customaite in action

See how AI transforms your own raw documents to compliant declarations in minutes.