Peter Justesen has a warehouse in Poland, and the Polish customs authorities impose numerous requirements on the files and specifications for each individual item: “The customs code, customs group, and specific item master data must be provided. For example, we deal in alcohol and tobacco, where the alcohol content, the beer’s Plato degree, net weight, gross weight, and the number of grams of tobacco in the cigarettes must be stated.

These are highly detailed product master data that must be provided every time we ship an order from Poland. If the packing lists do not meet the requirements of Polish customs, the authorities require additional inspections—which impacts shipping time,” explains Supply Chain Manager Kim Jønsson.

It is a complex manual process to provide this data to the trading partners who handle the customs declaration. With a standard ERP system, many Excel spreadsheets are created, where data is exported from the ERP system and reformatted in Excel into a packing list. From there, an XML file can be generated in Excel to match the packing list and be sent to customs.

“That was not a sustainable solution. We have large shipments with, for example, 50 orders and thousands of order lines. Excel can do a lot, but it also has its limits—it is not 100% stable due to the sheer number of formulas and variables. Working with it is very laborious, and the many macros mean that the person creating the packing lists and XML files is blocked for 30 minutes while the macros run. This could not be automated as standard and was a very expensive process.”

With Tabellae’s Excel module, Peter Justesen was able to generate shipping documents automatically by retrieving the data in real time directly from the ERP system—providing significantly greater security, as the data is 100% accurate. In addition, customs officers can transfer the packing list data directly into their system, resulting in shorter processing times.

With a button developed by Tabellae in the ERP system, an Excel packing list and a matching XML file are generated automatically—depending on the destination country. They always match, because the data is pulled directly from the ERP system at the same moment. This prevents errors in Excel spreadsheets and in sheet naming, and it also makes it easy to retrieve a packing list from three months ago without issues or errors.

This also means that the error rate is significantly reduced, because you no longer have to rely on:

• a customer service employee updating inventory when parts of an order are cancelled
• discrepancies occurring when an employee changes a column

With the Tabellae button, the packing list and the XML file are immediately up to date and can be sent directly to customs. Without this button, the data would have to be pulled from the data warehouse—with the risk of a delay of, for example, six hours if the system is only updated every six hours.

“The button reduces processing time in the shipping department. We have reduced our daily process time for creating packing lists by more than 75%. You can run it as batch jobs, simply select the desired destinations, press the button—and the documents are generated,” summarizes Kim Jønsson.