About Trans World Shipping
Trans World Shipping (or TWS) is an international Freight Forwarder who cover road, air and sea freight. Founded in Italy in 1992, they expanded internationally and started shipping into the UK in 2002. There are now 35 employees in the UK organisation which is based in Basildon, Essex.
TWS are particularly focused on luxury fashion customers, and work for many global renowned, high-end fashion manufacturers, where a tailored support package and consistency are important. These requirements match the “white glove” service levels that TWS are able to offer as a smaller organisation. For the UK organisation, shipments are primarily related to these European fashion brands, with the majority of movements being imports into the UK from Italy. Though, there is also reverse business with trailers carrying exports from UK manufacturers into Italy and the EU.
The challenge
Brexit created a requirement for customs clearance for any goods coming into the UK from Italy, and likewise goods moving goods from the UK into Europe.
With limited need for customs clearances prior to Brexit, TWS needed a simple solution for customs declarations that could be used by any member of staff without intensive training, thus enabling them to handle the significant increase in declaration numbers easily within existing resources.
Why choose ChannelPorts?
TWS had been a customer of ChannelPorts since 2011 and started planning for Brexit in 2019, so moving to CustomsPro was a natural progression as ChannelPorts were already a trusted partner in Customs Clearance.
Why CustomsPro?
Although TWS considered implementing a software solution, there were concerns about extensive training required for this along with the need to build substantial customs expertise in house.
TWS felt that utilising the customs experience they had experienced with ChannelPorts was a smarter solution, enabling them to maintain their focus on their core activity of freight movement. Moving to CustomsPro was a natural move, and Shaun Jackson of ChannelPorts worked closely with TWS to ensure a straightforward introduction.
Plan of action
TWS felt that implementing CustomsPro was smooth and straight forward with no issues beyond those mild issues they had expected due to having to adapt to a new way of working.
With a large volume of transactions it was important to migrate to API option in the longer term though. It was initially a struggle for TWS to get customers to provide data in the correct format and interfaces to get the API working and during this period clearance information was entered manually into the portal.
The solution to this problem was RenturApp.
RenturApp takes files in customers own formats and coverts them automatically into a format where the TWS can extract the relevant information automatically and feed it directly into CustomsPro via the API. This removed the need for any manual input.
Results
Today, TWS process up to 1000 declarations per month through CustomsPro. These are all processed automatically through the API, and all are processed through the UK office where there is a small team of 4 people involved with customs processes.
The benefits to TWS
Whilst the biggest benefit to TWS is the ability to create large volumes of declarations automatically, across all customers, ChannelPorts is more than CustomsPro.
ChannelPorts 24/7/365 service level is important to TWS, ensuring that goods keep moving without interruption, questions can be answered at all times of day, and issues resolved swiftly.
As well as describing CustomsPro as “A life saver”; Giorgio Vesprini of TWS summarised the benefits of CustomsPro succinctly:
“You need to understand customs and you need to be on top of everything, we’re getting the best of both worlds with ChannelPorts and CustomsPro”