Peter Justesen has a warehouse in Poland, and the Polish customs authorities have many requirements for receiving files and specifications about each individual item: “The customs code, customs group and special commodity master data must be specified. For example, we deal in alcohol and tobacco, where the alcohol percentage, degree of plato beer, net weight, cross weight and number of grams of tobacco in the cigarettes must be stated.

This is very detailed product master data that needs to be provided every single time we send an order out of Poland. If your packing lists do not comply with Polish customs requirements, the authorities will demand more checks, which affects shipping time,” says Supply Chain Manager, Kim Jønsson.

It’s a heavy manual process to deliver this data to your trading partners who do the registration for customs. With standard ERP, a lot of Excel sheets are created where data is extracted from the ERP system and reformatted in Excel as a packing list. From here, you can create an XML file via Excel that matches the packing list sent to customs. “This was not a sustainable solution. We have large deliveries with, for example, 50 orders and thousands of order lines. Excel can do a lot, but it also falls short – it is not 100% stable due to the amount of formulas and variables. It is very heavy to work with, while the many macros mean that the person creating the packing lists and XML files is locked for 30 minutes because the macros are running. This could not be automated by default and was a very expensive process.”

With Tabellae’s Excel module, Peter Justesen was able to create the shipping documents automatically by retrieving data directly from the ERP system
in real-time – and it provides much greater security as the data is 100% accurate. It also means that customs officers can plot the data on the packing list directly into their system, resulting in a shorter handling time.

In addition, Tabellae developed a button in the ERP system that, depending on the destination, creates an Excel packing list and an XML file that always matches
each other because data is taken directly from the ERP system in the snapshot. This avoids errors in Excel sheets and sheet naming, and you can pull out a packing list that is 3 months old without any errors.

It also means that the error rate drops significantly because you don’t have to rely on it:

• a customer service representative needs to update inventory if parts of an order are canceled
• there will be discrepancies if an employee changes something in a column.

With Tabellae’s button, the packing list and XML file are instantly live and can be sent directly to customs. Without the button, you would have to pull data out of your Data Warehouse with the risk of a delay of, for example, 6 hours if your setup is with updates every 6 hours.

“The button reduces handling time in the shipping department. We have reduced our daily processing time for creating packing slips by over 75%. You can run it as batch jobs, and then just select the destinations you want paper for, press the button – and they are generated,” concludes Kim Jønsson.