Export flow smoothed with customs App

On the 1st of July, the ‘Customs Export Application’ went live to serve the BRUcargo forwarders community. BRUcargo is the dedicated cargo area of Brussels Airport which handles 650,000 tonnes of freight annually, almost 500.000 tonnes flown. This application is one of the many apps made possible by the BRUcloud, the open community platform based on Nallian’s data-sharing technology and initiated by the cargo department of Brussels Airport Company about three years ago.

The app combines manifest data, which has been made available in the BRUcloud since 2016, with newly added data from the forwarders. The app matches the collected data at AWB level and reports a complete set of information automatically to customs. “It is the first result whereby information from different sources can be linked to one new solution, without much effort, but with great impact on the day-to-day operation of the companies participating”, says Steven Polmans, Head of Cargo and Logistics at Brussels Airport Company. “This is one of the several benefits we aimed for when developing our community platform”, he adds.

Forwarders who opt to connect to the ‘Customs Export App’ can drastically improve their efficiency by avoiding having to wait in lines at the Customs offices for the stamping of AWBs, avoiding having to create Excel list reports and having to collect alternative evidence manually, thus eliminating paper-based procedures and the resulting errors. Moreover, the Customs authorities give clearance priority to forwarders’ shipments handled via the Customs Export App. Before this procedure it could sometimes take a long time before documents were verified, as this had to be done manually. This resulted in a lot of work and had a negative impact on customer satisfaction.