Transforming Customs Clearance with Automation

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My role: %%%

Business Objective

Customs clearance is essential for global trade, ensuring goods move efficiently across borders while complying with import/export regulations. A customs import filing is the documentation required to legally bring goods into a country. Customs brokers handle product classification, duty calculation, and compliance to ensure smooth, penalty-free imports.

At Flexport, our Customs brokers relied on an inefficient system that required multiple workarounds to prioritize and complete work. This lack of automation led to delays, increased costs, and operational bottlenecks. To scale and service more enterprise clients while reducing filing costs by 80%, we needed to completely rethink customs processing.

The Shift to Automation

Recognizing the inefficiencies of the existing system, I took the lead in shifting from incremental improvements to an automation-first, task-based approach. While I set the strategic direction for this transformation, I worked closely with engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders to define priorities and ensure alignment with both technical feasibility and business objectives.

Key Challenges

Importer-Specific Requirements: Client settings were scattered across Confluence, SOPs, and other tools, making automation difficult and leading to inconsistencies in service quality.
Data Trust Issues: Brokers frequently encountered incorrect or missing data in the core platform, requiring them to cross-check multiple sources.
Inefficient Workflows: Brokers had to navigate multiple tools and websites to complete filings, slowing processes and reducing efficiency.
Lack of Work Prioritization: Customs managers lacked tools to effectively assign and manage work, leading to wasted time as brokers manually sorted through a queue.
Slow System Performance: Delays in the core platform disrupted productivity, impacting entry filing completion and eroding trust with importers and brokers.

Solution: Automating Customs Clearance with a Task-Based System

From Milestones to Task-Based Automation

Initially, the system relied on milestones and checklists. However, after extensive research and stakeholder discussions, I determined that prioritizing automation and leveraging a task-based escalation system would be the most effective approach. This ensured brokers received the right information at the right time, streamlining workflows and improving efficiency.

Approach & Key Innovations

I established the guiding principles for the new Task Manager while collaborating with engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders to define priorities and introduce key innovations that drove efficiency:

Automation-First Approach: Continuous validation reduced manual entry and ensured accuracy by collecting structured data via EDI or API and standardizing inputs for automation. Manual intervention occurred only when system confidence was low.
Make Tasks Easy to Understand and Complete: The issue should be immediately clear, with all necessary information included to resolve the task efficiently.
Prioritize Tasks by Urgency with Intelligent Task Routing: Tasks were dynamically assigned and prioritized, reducing bottlenecks.
Establish Feedback Loops: Continuously refine tasks to improve efficiency, with the goal of reducing or automating them over time.
Implement Business Rules: Tailor data rules to individual client needs, ensuring compliance and consistency across processes.
AI-Driven Data Validation: Ensures compliance before submission, reducing errors.
Commercial Invoice Digitization: Automates data extraction and processing using LLMs, minimizing manual input.

Defining UX Principles to Improve Trust and Ease of Use

Early in the project, I established trust and ease of use as the core user experience principles, ensuring the system provided accurate, reliable data while maintaining a simple and predictable workflow. To measure the effectiveness of feature changes, we used quantitative metrics, including time on task, task completion rate, task success rate, adoption rate, number of interactions and qualitative feedback.

Impact & Outcomes

Key Metrics

50% cost reduction per entry ($114 to $43) in 2024 through Task Manager automation and operational improvements.
25% of Importer Security Filings (ISF) now processed automatically. 100% of ISFs expected to be processed via the Task Manager by 2025.
80% of US entry volume expected to be processed via the Task Manager by 2025.
20% efficiency increase in commercial document transcription.

Real-World Benefits

Reduced Cost to Serve: Automated task routing significantly improves efficiency, minimizes manual workload, and directly reduces the cost to serve, our primary metric for evaluating operational improvements.
Scalability: Supports 2K-24K entries per year, enabling growth.
Improved Compliance: AI-powered validation reduces errors.

By defining the vision and execution strategy for automation while working cross-functionally to implement and refine it, I successfully delivered the Task Manager, significantly improving speed and accuracy for customs filings.

Customs Pattern Library: Scaling Design Consistency

To ensure consistency, scalability, and efficiency, I designed and maintained the Customs Pattern Library, a centralized design system that streamlined collaboration between designers and engineers.

Key Contributions & Impact

Developed a reusable Figma component library, ensuring uniform design patterns and increasing design efficiency while reducing redundant UI work.
Established comprehensive design guidelines for typography, layout, and behavior.
Collaborated with engineers to integrate components in Storybook, ensuring design-development parity and accelerating development cycles with pre-built UI components.

Design Leadership & Organizational Impact

Embedding Design Thinking & Strategy

I worked closely with leadership, engineers, and product managers to integrate design thinking into daily workflows:

Partnering with engineers to develop user-friendly solutions and improve iterative development.
Training engineers on user research, covering usability testing, feedback documentation, and applying insights to enhance design.
Collaborating with product managers to define strategy and prioritize features based on user and business needs.

Leading User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

During the launch of Customs V2, I led User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to ensure a smooth transition. Key efforts included:

Coordinating structured testing sessions with stakeholders onsite for an intensive week of testing.
Defining workflows to validate critical tasks and scenarios.
Collaborating with engineers to prioritize and resolve high-impact issues efficiently.

By driving cross-functional collaboration and strategic alignment, I ensured design became a core driver of product success and business impact.

Final Thoughts

The Task Manager transformed an outdated, manual-heavy process into an automated, efficient, and scalable system. By prioritizing UX, automation, and real-time insights, I created a platform that significantly improved cost-efficiency and user experience.

Key Challenges

Navigating Complexity - Customs regulations are ambiguous and continuously evolving, requiring deep domain expertise to define problems accurately.
Balancing Design Quality & Execution - As a 0-1 project, we had to prioritize releasing functional features to support scale over refining visual design and deeper ideation.
Managing Priorities as the Sole Designer - Juggling research, user testing, stakeholder management, design, and execution while meeting tight deadlines was a significant challenge.

Key Takeaways

Automation Enhances UX: A seamless, automated workflow simplifies operations and improves accuracy.
Scalability is Critical: A modular, API-driven system ensures long-term growth and adaptability.
Data-Driven Decisions Matter: Real-time insights empower smarter business choices.

Let's connect to discuss further refinements or insights!