Sealey

The challenge

Increased paperwork and administration caused by Brexit

Following Brexit, importing goods into Northern Ireland became significantly more complex due to the increased paperwork required. For businesses moving goods in or out of Northern Ireland, the UK Government provides the Trader Support Service (TSS) to guide them through the new processes introduced by the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Sealey needed to submit declarations to the UK Government's TSS via its website. For every trailer of goods they ship across the Irish Sea—almost on a daily basis—they are required to make a declaration. Each trailer typically contains multiple consignments, with each consignment destined for a different customer in Northern Ireland.

A single consignment often consists of numerous tool and workshop equipment items. On average, each trailer or declaration has over 200 different goods lines, meaning Sealey staff had to manually input 200 lines of data into the TSS website every day, resulting in a time-consuming and error-prone process.

The solution

A digital solution to streamline the declaration process

To alleviate the burden of manual data entry, Sealey was already producing a report from their internal stock and ordering system in a spreadsheet format, which staff would use to manually enter data into the TSS website. However, Sealey became aware that the TSS offered an API for automated submission of declaration data and approached PDMS to integrate their system with the TSS.

PDMS developed the bespoke TraderTap system that takes Sealey's data in CSV format, parses and validates it into normalised tables for the three levels of data: Declaration, Consignments, and Goods. The system then processes the data, sending it to the TSS API in the correct order, item by item. It now takes less than one minute to submit a reasonably big file to the TSS website.

Additionally, PDMS implemented a solution for the limitation of 99 goods items per consignment. As Sealey frequently handles consignments exceeding this limit, the system automatically splits large consignments into smaller ones to meet this restriction.

The project

Seamless integration with the TSS service

There are three types of records required by the TSS:

• ENS - Entry Summary Declaration
• SFD - Simplified Frontier Declaration
• SDI - Supplementary Declaration 

The initial upload creates a draft ENS which they can submit via our system.  This generates a SFD more or less immediately by TSS, and when a shipment of goods arrives in Northern Ireland, a draft SDI is created. PDMS’ solution allows for any draft SDI records to be updated and resent. 

After the initial submission of the ENS record, our system can check the TSS for updates. For example, it is possible to check if an SFD or Supplementary Declaration record has been created yet and retrieve information about the records including their new ID.