How AEO Now became four times more productive

Industry
Import/Export

AEO Now is a customs specialist. They help parties process import and export documents. Thanks to Brexit and cross border e-commerce, there has been a large increase in demand for AEO Now's services.

This increase in demand has been difficult to keep up with, as there are too few customs specialists. This led to frustration.
First, growth opportunities could not be seized.
In addition, the specialists that AEO Now already had were spending much of their time doing repetitive, boring work. This also dissatisfied the employees.

With the engagement of Yarado, all the repetitive, copy-paste work has been taken over from the specialists. AEO Now can now seize their intended growth opportunities, with satisfied specialists doing work they enjoy.
With Yarado, they also have another scalable solution for the next phase of their growth.

Yarado impact in figures

4x

more customs files processed per hour, per employee.

3,5x

Faster processing of a customs file.

80%

more shipments checked.

With Yarado, AEO Now can grab the growth opportunities they have in front of them. Without overworking their managers and employees. Also, employees can focus on the work they are trained to do, which greatly increases their satisfaction.

AEO Now's customers see that their customs specialist can now actually grow with them. Files are also processed faster than before, leading to more satisfied customers.

The full story of Adriaan

Adriaan Kruisheer is a compliance consultant at
AEO Now and COO at Valitrade.

Customs specialists are not for the taking

AEO Now is a customs consulting company. They focus on the quality and compliance of their clients' customs declarations. Compliance means making sure you comply with all laws and regulations. They do this for e-commerce and transportation companies, among others. It is a specialized field and specialists are scarce. Reason enough to make the people you have in house work as efficiently as possible.

"We were doing monks' work and I didn't feel productive when we were still doing the copy-pasting ourselves."

Copy-pasting is such a waste
Adriaan is one of those. An expert on customs compliance. But he found himself spending much of his day copy-pasting behind his screen. Adriaan: "We did fifty checks a day, manually. Entering Control C, Control V to check the dates of declarations. Real monk's work. I didn't feel productive, not useful. While the work we do is incredibly important. We can save our customers a lot of money and difficulties at the border."

The helm
So that had to change. Adriaan turned to his partner Barry Mastenbroek. They went looking for a party who could automate for them the copy-paste and enrichment of declaration data. So that the experts could focus on thinking and making decisions based on their expertise. That's how they ended up with Yarado. Adriaan: "We compared several automation parties but almost nowhere could we see at a glance what it would cost. I found that quite irritating. With Yarado this was immediately clear, so we didn't have to think long to hire a software robot here."

"Now our experts can throw themselves into the thinking."

Four times more productive thanks to Yarado

The results are thick with satisfaction. Adriaan: "We have become almost 4 times faster thanks to the use of Yarado. First we could do 8 declarations per hour, now there are sometimes as many as 30. We leave the repetitive work to the robot and do the thinking work ourselves that we are trained for. My knowledge is worth more than my Control C, Control V abilities. It has made my colleagues and I feel more useful and productive."

Being able to keep up with growth again

Moreover, AEO Now was able to continue to grow in 2021 thanks to the use of Yarado because they were able to process more declarations than before. Adriaan: "Before, we were really running out of time and had trouble keeping up with the number of declarations. We were up against the limit. If one of our clients had wanted to file an extra large number of returns one month, we would have had to hire 1 or 2 people part-time. This while those people are just not to be found. Fortunately, it didn't have to come to that."

"At first we could do eight declarations per hour, now sometimes as many as 30."

Software using software
In addition to automating administrative work at AEO Now, Adriaan also deploys the Yarado software robot at a partner company: Vali Trade. This is the company's customs software branch. It works on the basis of Artificial Intelligence and algorithmically checks whether customs declarations are logical. For example, is your goods code correct and the corresponding import duties you have to pay? Adriaan: "Especially when you import large volumes, you want to know this, because then discovering an error can save you an awful lot of money." Here, the Yarado software robot helps with writing data to a database and enriching the data, because it is often not supplied complete by Vali Trade customers."

"The days of administrative work being done by people should be over"

You can start tomorrow already
Adriaan is surprised at the large number of companies that are not yet doing anything with automation and recommends Yarado. "If you want to automate something in the short term, Yarado is a very good party. You can start as early as tomorrow. Especially with the tightness in the labor market, it's a real waste to let the workers you do find do simple administrative work. You would expect that the days of people doing administrative work are also somewhat over, but nothing could be further from the truth, it seems. So there are plenty of opportunities in automation. In logistics, for example, almost everything is still printed out and stored in physical filing cabinets. There is a world to be gained here."

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