One golden standard, flexible to every importer’s way
How a European customs broker amplifies its brokers’ expertise as it scales capacity across Europe
Business Overview
A specialist customs broker founded more than three decades ago and part of a global logistics group, the company has more than 50 offices across 17 countries, from the UK to the Netherlands, France, Spain and Germany. Its brokers file import declarations for a mixed book of importers, from food manufacturing to apparel, through its own customs management platform, and it has run Raft in production since 2022.
Case Study Product Focus
Raft Customs: Agentic AI that reads every document and email associated with a customs shipment, applies the broker’s own filing rules to drive Raft agent’s data sourcing, collection and chasing ready for broker review and declaration creation in its customs management system.
The problem
A shipment lands in the broker’s inbox: a commercial invoice, a packing list, a delivery note, sometimes a spreadsheet hundreds of lines long. Before a broker can file, they check every line against what that importer wants. No two importers want a declaration done the same way, and their instructions shift with the commodity, the supplier and the destination, on top of the company’s own filing standard.
So the broker sources the HS code, works out the net weight per line, checks the data against every procedure and keys the entry, then opens the next shipment and does it again for a different importer. Rules can capture any one of those instructions, but not every combination, so the variation lived in the brokers’ heads, at up to 30 to 40 minutes a declaration.
Why they chose Raft
The company has run Raft’s AI in production since 2022. When Raft Agents arrived, the project lead for its intelligent document processing programme had a key requirement that the licensed broker stays in charge.
Raft is built that way: the broker sets the directives, Raft’s agents action against the rules they set, and ultimate judgement stays with the specialist brokers. From the company’s historical submissions, Raft captured and created their golden-standard declaration form to set the consistent baseline.
Embedded company SOPs then layered on top to ensure each importer’s needs were served, so automation scaled to a mixed book without forcing every account into one rulebook.
“Every importer we work for has its own way of wanting a declaration done, and it changes with the commodity and the supplier. Our brokers carry all of that knowledge account by account, and they’re very good at it. What we needed as a company was a way to capture that tribal knowledge and set a foundational level of consistency that works for the whole team, on every entry and for every new joiner, not just for the person who remembers it.”
What its teams do now
Its brokers open each entry with the manual data legwork already done. The Raft Customs Agent reviews the whole shipment, matches the data against the importer’s records and the company’s parts database, and supports the broker in checking HS codes against HMRC sources.
When a value is missing from one document, the agent looks across the rest of the set and shows the broker where the data was found, or drafts an email to request it. Brokers can redirect the agent in plain English mid-entry and sign off every declaration themselves. Each question a broker settles is captured for that importer’s next shipment, so one person’s know-how becomes how the whole team files.
Annually the company throughputs north of 190,000 customs-related documents through Raft, with field-level accuracy reaching 97.3% on its most automated flows. A declaration that took up to 30 to 40 minutes now takes around eight minutes of action from upload to done.
The company has taken the same golden-standard approach to its offices across Europe, adding capabilities such as net weight apportioned across invoice lines by value, so its brokers spend their expertise on the decisions that need a licensed customs professional.
“A declaration that used to take us up to 40 minutes now takes around eight. The manual legwork is done before the broker opens it, the agent shows us where every value came from, and every time one of our brokers settles a question, it becomes a directive the whole team works from. The judgment stays with our brokers. What’s changed is how much of their time goes into the work only they can do.”
