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What better time than the start of the summer holidays to look back and reflect on the first 6 months of the year?
Time flies and it feels like yesterday that my kids (10 & 14 years old) graduated from their classes in primary and secondary school in 2023. Another year passed by in the blink of an eye.
The same goes for what happened at Customaite. We created our 2024 business plan at the end of last year, and the first six months have passed by incredibly fast.
With great pride and gratitude for what our team and customers have achieved, I’d like to share the highlights of these 6 months with you.
First, a massive thank you to our customers
Our customers are amazing. They all have taken brave decisions to embrace emerging technology in their operations. They are the early adopters in a market that is traditionally considered rather conservative.
This year I’d like to thank especially Wim Gijbels from H.Essers for his testimonial, Chris Clayton from DB Schenker for taking the stage and talking about us at Multimodal, and Dirk Pottilius from Ziegler for his participation in a video podcast about technology in customs (which will be released early September).
I’d also like to thank Stijn, Michel, Ivan and Wietse from Manuport for our joint participation in the Transport Media awards where we were runners-up in the category ‘Logistics Project of the Year’.
Achievements from our team
Nothing great in the world has ever been achieved without passion
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Our team is what drives Customaite, our people’s enthusiasm and passion for both the product and our customers are essential for the results we deliver.
We delivered over 20 new value adding features, all driven by customer feedback to further accelerate efficiency improvements and increasing compliance. To get a glance of how we work with our customers, you can read our article on our latest customer event.
Delivering features is one thing; measuring delivered value is what really matters.
We believe that the most valuable metric to measure results is the time it takes people to complete a case in Customaite. We measure these times continuously and report on them to our customers.
Below you can see the evolution of these timings.
Average cross-customer lead times evolution in 2024.
These timings are based on cross-customer data insights. The key takeaways are:
- We see a massive shift in how Customaite is being used. Transit volumes did not evolve significantly but we see exponential growth in import cases (see graph below).
- Lead times for Transit and Export have a positive evolution.
- Import timings are status quo, which is caused by the fact that we added more features that save time previously spent outside of Customaite. The main feature for this is our algorithms that automatically combine information from invoice lines with packing list lines.
Evolution of how Customaite is being used by our customers from the start.
Our team’s efforts are being rewarded by our growth and the positive feedback we receive from our customers.
Evolution/Growth of Customaite usage from the start.
Exponential growth becomes visible in the first half of 2024.
At the end of 2023, we were active in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Today, we are live in 9 countries in Europe and will soon be adding more.
Countries where we are supporting customs teams already.
Latest features that make a big difference
Our team put in tremendous efforts to deliver value-adding features, learning our AI new languages and improving our out-of-the-box extraction models.
If there is one feature that really stands out as a game-changer for the first half of 2024, it’s our newest algorithm that automatically matches information from invoice lines with information from packing list lines and the user interface that enables the declarant to verify and correct if necessary.
Screenshot of the visualisation. The invoice is at the left, packing list at the right.
If you want to get an impression of our killer features, you can check them out here. It includes some screen recordings and a full list of Customaite’s features.
If you’d like to have a demo, we are happy to have a talk about what Customaite can do for your company. Booking a demo is as easy as picking a timeslot that suits you.
Recognition for our expertise
We were invited multiple times to share our knowledge on AI and what role it can play in the context of logistics and customs.
Our Chief Product, Bram Vanschoenwinkel, was invited to the WCO’s innovation & data hub. He was also asked to host a workshop on the topic by FIATA during their HQ meeting in Geneva last April. He wrote an article about it, which you can find here: Embracing the Future of Customs Declarations at FIATA 2024.
Last but not least, he took the stage at Multimodal 2024 in June and shared our vision on automation in logistics and how many business processes are still paper-driven, although it being digital paper today. Bram shares the key insights in the following article: The Invisible Paper Chain in Today’s Customs Document Flow.
After his presentation, he also took part in a panel discussion with other industry leaders.
Evolutions in our Customer Success Team
We always take a partnership approach with our customers, striving for a win-win situation. Our customer success team is key in this as they help our customers to maximise their ROI.
We introduced several new initiatives to help enable declarants in their change trajectory.
First of all, we added some gamification in our techniques by introducing a business game called ‘Time Poker’. In this game, declarants come to a consensus on baselines for the time they spend doing things manually. This helps them to see the progress they are making week after week as they grow into their new way of working.
Secondly, we added a touch of fun to our concept of business impact plans. The business impact plan is what we define with the customer’s leadership and is a way to measure progress in reaching the company’s strategic goals. We added an optional business game that gives rewards to the team when intermediate goals are reached.
On the more serious side, we upgraded our support tooling and processes to facilitate our growth and take pride in keeping this customer-facing function in our own team. We also implemented a certification programme that recognises the expertise and knowledge of declarants that can use Customaite to maximise efficiency.
Our competitive edge: show, don’t just tell
This is what we learned about the emerging market of technology providers that are also offering similar benefits for customs teams, making use of AI.
- Most generic AI solutions will require you to train the system by what is called data labelling in our industry.
In practice, this means that someone in your team needs to indicate where the AI needs to look for information on the document, for every single line and for multiple cases of documents with the same layout.
For you, this means: time-consuming data labelling for every new case.
Our approach works out-of-the-box. When the result is not to your satisfaction, you can train the AI by just explaining what one line looks like and it will be able to extract the full document.
- Some don’t have AI at all and just use it as a marketing term. There are those that use Mechanical Turks (behind the scenes, people are typing over your documents) or those that use templates to understand document structures.
For you, this means: it will be hard to scale and big cases will take a lot of time. Templates imply new work for every new document layout you encounter.
- Start-ups can lack experience or maturity to assure security, data protection and business continuity for your operations. At Customaite, we have always followed security-by-design principles and built software that scales with your demand.
Our efforts have been recognised by our final ISO27001 audit which we passed mid-June. We’re expecting to receive our certification any day now.
- Lastly and probably most importantly: There are still some competitors out there relying on smoke and mirrors, focusing on marketing rather than offering a working solution. We learned from a global logistics player that investigated 30 companies that we were the only ones that offer live demos on real-life examples.
Our advice: always ask for a demo on some of your cases.
Innovation
Customaite was born from an innovation initiative, and we are using innovative technologies to realise the value we provide.
In the world of technology, the speed of evolution is immense. Just think about ChatGPT which came out in its first version under 2 years ago and how that has evolved.
At Customaite, we believe that it is important to keep a focus on innovation and the opportunities that new technology can bring to further increase our value proposition.
We organise innovation days regularly and let our team experiment with alternative ways to solve our customers’ challenges. The focus in the first half of 2024 was on the potential of large language models (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT) when put to the task of finding information in unstructured documents.
We’ve seen a positive evolution in their capabilities and will put them to use for tasks that they are capable of whilst still assuring data privacy and staying true to our vision of ‘Human-assisted AI’.
What’s next?
In the second half of 2024, more exciting things will happen.
- We are onboarding new customers and our user community will grow further, especially in the UK and our home market (BeNe).
- Our team will grow; we are actively looking for an experienced all-round marketeer and a junior software engineer. If you think you know someone that can be a good match, just lead them to our jobs page.
- We’ll conclude our market analysis on a product extension in Forwarding.
- New features will be added. In the second half of 2024, we plan to introduce increased efficiency gains in document consistency checks, enable information merging from other documents than packing lists, and self-service management reporting. Meanwhile, we will continue improving on our core and further increase efficiency gains in our main value proposition.
If you’d like to stay tuned, we are happy to invite you to follow us on LinkedIn!
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