Entry Management

Issues and Challenges

As a purchase order is confirmed by a supplier and prepared to be shipped to the buyer, a great deal of information about the shipment must be consolidated and properly formatted to facilitate a successful entry at the destination port.

Example data elements include HS number, product weights and dimensions, product costs, shipping instructions, vessel number, port codes, country of origin, etc. These various data elements come from the different parties involved in the transaction: supplier, carrier, importer, forwarder, broker, or others. Collecting, validating, and packaging these data elements in the proper format is a daunting task.

Invariably, data elements are late or missing, re-keying errors occur, duties are improperly calculated, etc. In cases where countries require advanced security notifications - such as the Importer Security Filing (ISF) in the US - these issues result in delaying the shipment's entry to the port. In other cases, goods are detained by Customs, where brokers scramble to collect missing or inaccurate data to facilitate clearance and release of the goods.

Challenges include:

• Sending shipment data to the broker without introducing errors

• Filtering and transmitting large volumes of transaction data in an acceptable format to Customs via a broker

• Reincorporating the data received from Customs through the broker back into the system

• Responding in a timely fashion to messages or requests from Customs to prevent delays in clearance

• Extracting and submitting certain data elements to authorities prior to arrival at the port of entry

• Using all available information to calculate final landed costs, including duties, taxes and additional fees

How Amber Road Can Help

Amber Road's Import Management Solution provides comprehensive support for entry processes. An important aspect of this support comes from a pre-Customs entry transaction. In this process, the system analyzes and assembles information from the purchase order, shipment notification and commercial invoice and assembles it into a pre-Customs entry.

The pre-Customs entry is an intelligent compilation of transaction information both for internal accounting and auditing purposes and for external parties. The process of creating and validating the pre-Customs entry involves multiple steps, including:

• Running business rules that determine which data is pulled into the pre-Customs entry

• Performing an admissibility review on each line item in the shipment

• Validating that required data is present

• Normalizing and converting data across currencies, units of measure, etc.

• Calculating accurate duties and taxes for actual landed cost

Once validated, the pre-Customs entry contains the final version of cleansed and relevant data for the shipment. A further, configurable process extracts the specific data that the broker will need to facilitate Customs filing and converts it to XML. The system packages the XML, along with PDFs of generated forms, license certificates and supporting documents, and sends it to the broker electronically, thereby reducing errors caused by rekeying data.

Additionally, Amber Road Customs Entry Visibility allows organizations to accurately track, manage and report on the duties, taxes and fees for cross-border shipments. The solution cost-effectively captures global declaration details in declared and normalized values for regional or corporate reporting standards. By normalizing costs across all countries involved in the import process, corporate compliance teams can more accurately analyze process deficiencies and improve decision making with internal constituents, suppliers and other service providers.