Bolloré Transport & Logistics adopts Conex’s ZEN solution and transforms its working relationship with its customers
At Bolloré Transport & Logistics, 275 metropolitan declarants are employed to process customs and security declarations. Little by little, the increase in administrative processing brought about by Brexit has prompted customer collaboration work to be further digitalised: the exchange of information is now organised around a documentary platform which receives and stores all the information exchanged, makes it possible to visualise processing progress, gives alerts in the event of hot spots, and produces periodic reports.
Towards a complete digitalisation of shared work
On post-Brexit 1st January 2021, the Bolloré Logistics Customs department suggested that its customer NESTLE work on the Conex ZEN platform. This secure digital workspace receives, centralises and archives documents and correspondence between the registered customs representative-freight forwarder and its customers, making it possible to optimise the completion of customs formalities for import / export operations. ZEN via conex™, which organises exchanges in a methodical way, quickly proved its worth and other Bolloré customers followed suit and joined forces with the collaboration tool…
“The Nestlé Group was the first customer to switch to this new work organisation, first, 10 declarants used it for the exchanges with their correspondents in 7 or 8 factories. Today, 30 declarants are connected to the tool for 6 customers and the movement is speeding up, with 100 declarants and about 15 customers planned to make the move in the short term. In the deployment stage, 2 hours are enough to train new users,” explains Jean-François Ledun, Customs Director at Bolloré Logistics.
Greater processing visibility and speed
ZEN via conex™ offers users a timesaving, collaborative workspace. Through an IT link, ZEN automatically assigns data to the corresponding declaration fields in CUSTOMS via conex™, the customs declaration software. The mandatory documents are thus progressively pre-filled, the only human intervention being for the purposes of verification.
ZEN provides traceability of exchanges between Bolloré and its customers at this pre-declaration stage. The customer gradually uploads the necessary documents to the declarants, ZEN intelligently organises all the data flows while the customer can follow closely throughout the life of the declarative file. An alert notifies the declarant concerned of any action on the platform, and he/she can then access the transmitted documents. The exchanges in the pre-declaration phase are tracked and the platform centralises documents and information which in the past arrived via a variety of methods such as email, telephone, drive etc, depending on each person’s habits.
Jean-François Ledun explains: “We know, file by file, where we are at any given moment, thanks to a condensed overview; if data is missing to clear an entry, we see it immediately and can take care of it as a priority.”
When the declarant sends the declaration to the customs administration, the processing workflow is tracked, and the customer and the declarant are kept informed of progress in real time.
Report templates are customisable according to customer criteria, so no more wasted time searching for data to compile reports. Performance indicators, such as the average processing time per declaration, are calculated automatically, and financial management data are summarised (amounts of customs duties, VAT, etc.).
“As a registered customs representative, and therefore a service provider, we must periodically provide reports to our customers. In some cases, it could take man-days to compile the information and present the renderings to the customer; with ZEN, creating reports is made easy, with preformatted templates,” emphasises Jean-François Ledun.
Finally, document and declaration archiving in ZEN via conex™ is another advantage: it is operated at the request of a customer for up to 10 years for all declarations and documents. The opposability of the archiving is reinforced by the use of Blockchain technology which will certify and timestamp each document and action making up the file.
About ZEN via conex™: ZEN via conex™ is a collaborative platform for exchanging, centralising, tracking and archiving data, documents and electronic messages. The customer can thus log all the movement of entries throughout the import/export process, from the pre-declarative phase right through to filing. Multiple actors – customers, partners, collaborators, importers, exporters, carriers … -, intervene in turn to enrich the declaration, in a collaborative workflow.
About Bolloré Transport & Logistics
Bolloré Transport & Logistics is a major international transport and logistics operator with 35,000 employees in 109 countries on five continents. A specialist in multimodal transport, the group operates through four businesses: Bolloré Ports, Bolloré Logistics, Bolloré Energy and Bolloré Railways.
For more information: https://www.bollore-transport-logistics.com
About Conex
Partner to large corporations and SMEs in all sectors of activity, CONEX develops and markets a range of collaborative tools for the management of customs and security declarations. Its customers, importing/exporting companies, carriers, RDE (Registered Customs Representatives), use its solutions and services to optimise and secure the entry, processing and electronic exchange of declarations for all their international trade in goods.
CONEX has been involved for nearly 40 years in developments in international trade and the supply chain, supporting economic operators in their customs operations, and collaborating with European and international customs administrations.
CONEX, whose historic headquarters are located near Lille (Orchies), has offices in Paris, and two subsidiaries in Belgium and the United Kingdom. An independent SME, created in 1985, CONEX has around sixty employees.
