How WA Customs was able to continue to grow despite the scarcity of needed personnel

How WA Customs was able to continue to grow despite scarcity of needed personnel

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Alkine Barendrecht is Senior Customs agent at WA Customs

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Busy times thanks to the Brexit

WA Customs is a customs agent. That means they take care of the customs paperwork when importing and exporting goods from their clients. Their potential reach is wide: all companies trading internationally with and from the Netherlands and Belgium. So they may also count large companies with offices around the world among their competitors, while they themselves are only 18 people. The Brexit has made things a lot busier, because the goods to and from England now also all have to be processed by customs agents. At the same time, finding good people is difficult at the moment because of tightness in the labor market. All the more reason for the people who are there to work as efficiently as possible.

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"From a whole morning to half an hour a day."

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Time savings of 45 percent

Alkine Barendrecht is a Senior Customs Agent at WA Customs. She tried Yarado's software robot for the first time in March 2022. With success: "We started with invoices. At first two administrative employees spent 4 hours a day doing this. Going through the same 10 to 12 steps each time to get from file to invoice. Now the Yarado software robot - called Merrtie - has almost completely taken over this process. My colleagues now spend only half an hour a day checking the software robot. So they have regained 3.5 hours of their day. That's a time savings of almost 45 percent. And they use that to support the rest of the team and help at the front desk. So the whole company benefits." So saving time is the single biggest benefit of using Yarado for WA Customs. "This way we can do more with the current workforce and continue to grow."

User-friendly portal

WA Customs is helped by developer Menno from Yarado. "We really like the fact that we always switch with the same person at Yarado. Menno first had to familiarize himself with our software and that worked out well. The implementation is really people work. We are very pleased with the cooperation with Menno. I also needed him once on a Saturday and that was no problem at all." This by no means means means that WA Customs needs Menno for everything. Alkine: "Yarado's software is designed so that you can work with it yourself. In the future, I even think that support from Yarado won't even be necessary. This is because the Yarado portal is very user-friendly and everything is described in small steps. And not in code language, but in language that even a layman can understand. That does make it so insightful."

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"Understandable language, even for the layman"

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CEO meets CEO

How they came to Yarado? "We had been looking for a way to optimize our processes for some time. Then our CEO, Benny, ran into Yarado's CEO, Jop, at a trade show. Benny immediately had the idea that Yarado could be useful for us, but wanted to check with me first because he himself specializes more in customs documentation than in technology. I had one important question: can the Yarado software robot communicate with our software? The answer is a clear "yes. What's hot: within 2 weeks the first automated processes were already up and running."

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Optimization in the broadest sense of the word

Alkine Barendrecht of WA Customs would definitely recommend Yarado to other companies. "On birthdays, I often tell people, 'I got a robot as a gift from my boss.' And to speak in more work-related terms, it's really an optimization exercise in the broadest sense of the word. I think every company has certain standard processes that they could automate with Yarado. Every company can benefit from this. At WA Customs, we work a lot with transportation companies and they also have standard processes. Why couldn't a robot like this partially take over those?"

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"Any business can benefit from a software robot."

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On to a digital archive

At the moment, the Yarado software robot helps with invoices, and soon digital archiving. "Everything comes to us by mail and we now manually create documents from the emails. That should also be able to be automated. Also, we still do the filing on paper, so I am a bulk consumer at my local office supply store. So digital filing would save a lot of trees in addition to time."

Plenty of automation opportunities in the customs industry

Alkine is convinced that robots cannot take over everything. "But in our business maybe 60 percent. Especially with the current tight labor market, aren't you crazy if you don't go for such an optimization effort?" She sees around her that there is a lot of talk in the customs industry about automation but that it often remains just talk. "For example, people have been talking for years that it would be useful if we could transfer all the data of goods being exported directly to the party importing. Now both the importer and exporter enter the same data into their own systems. That, of course, is not practical. A shared interface would be a solution. I'm sure Yarado can build that, for WA Customs and our regular carriers."

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WIll you, like WA Customs, give your employees back 45 percent of their week like this? Schedule a free demo, and we'll tell you all about our software robots in half an hour. 

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