In international trade, companies must comply with the many global laws and regulations that surround trading activities – the import and export of products. Trade compliance applies to all worldwide activities and governs business decisions related to finance, purchasing, supply management and customs as managed by the corporate trade compliance department.
Duty Drawback
Importing involves paying various governments to get your products into the country. The U.S. government refunds duties, taxes and fees on goods and raw materials that are imported and later exported from the U.S. as unused or finished goods. This is called Duty Drawback. Nearly $300 trillion is spent each year on duty on goods and services, and that number increases every year. Over 90% is refunded via drawback.
The two most common uses of Duty Drawback are:
- Manufacturing – When you import an item that is manufactured into another item. If you import a pair of bicycle tires and pay duty on them, add those tires to a U.S. manufactured bicycle that you then export, you can reclaim the duty originally paid on those imported tires.
- Unused Merchandise – When you import something and then export it in the same unused condition. Let’s say you import three bicycle tires and pay duty on them, then sell two but end up exporting the third, you can reclaim the duty originally paid on this imported tire.
You can use the money saved through Duty Drawback to offer foreign customers lower prices, which may help you win against your competitors.
The Challenge
Companies receive trade compliance documents from multiple brokers and suppliers scattered across geographical areas. They are classified as import duty documents, with or without drawback, and export documents. These documents can come from broker websites, as email attachments, via FTP, etc.
Managing a high volume of trade compliance documents can be challenging. Automatically extracting relevant information from these documents and sending that information directly to TMS systems drives efficiency and provides greater visibility into the duty claimed or to be claimed. Auditing improves with document management, retrieval and archiving capabilities.
The task of getting relevant information from documents and feeding it into a transaction system is usually done manually. But a manual trade compliance process is time consuming and error prone. There is also a lapse in the audit process due to manual document handling.
The Solution
Document Digitizer, or Doc.ai, is a powerful, AI-fueled cloud-based app that automates the extraction of information from documents. It performs format-agnostic data extraction, transformation, validation and integration with downstream systems. Automation ensures higher levels of accuracy and efficiency, saving precious manual effort that can be leveraged for more value-added activities.
Document Digitizer extracts unstructured data from a variety of documents (e.g., PDFs, JPGs), puts it into a structured format and integrates easily with transaction systems for further processing using structured formats like XMLs, JSON, etc.
Document Digitizer Spectrum
Document Digitizer creates an automated document processing system that can be used for digitizing documents across multiple domains within an organization. Documents belonging to their respective domains will have their own business rules for information extraction, their own process for performing extraction, and their own custom integrations built for document ingestion and data migration to the relevant downstream systems.
What remains constant across all the domains is the workflow automation, which reduces the number of FTE required for performing the digitization activities.
Document Digitizer Features
Interactive User Interface
- Intuitive document processing workflows
- Easy validation, approval and rejection with built-in notifications
Custom Setup
- Custom exception handling and notifications
- Configuration of custom business rules
- Referencing multiple data sources for data validation
- Secure role-based access to system
Support for Multiple Languages
- English
- Dutch
- Spanish
- German
- French
- and More
Advanced Analytics on Extracted Data
- Dashboards focused on key KPIs
- Anomaly detection and correction recommendations
Document Digitizer Solution Workflow
Document Digitizer helps automate the entire process – from collecting trade compliance documents from external sources, to digitizing and extracting relevant information from the documents, to sending the extracted data to relevant TMS systems.
Even though there are multiple document formats and templates, Document Digitizer can perform format-agnostic extraction. The extracted data can be made readily available on demand or sent in an automated manner at the end of each month in the form of reports.
Dashboards can be used to view and analyze extracted data, including:
- Duty Paid
- Claimed Drawback
- Drawback Savings
- Drawback Discrepancy
With Document Digitizer, companies can take steps to establish an environment that empowers their people to perform tasks more effectively and in an accelerated manner.
