How SFL combined back-office execution and automation to reduce customs and rate-entry workload for the Australian operation of a global vehicle-logistics leader.
At the Australian office of a global multimodal logistics company, experienced teams were spending a significant part of their time entering information that still had to be processed line by line. Customs compilations could run into hundreds of product lines on a single invoice. Carrier rate contracts also required continuous maintenance before the business could reliably use auto-rating and auto-costing inside CargoWise.
The volume was substantial: around 8,000 customs product lines and 10,000 rate lines every month.
For the operation, that created a straightforward capacity problem. The more time skilled staff spent compiling customs data or maintaining tariffs, the less time they had for the work that required their judgement: validating declarations, resolving exceptions, serving customers and managing the movement itself.
Adding more people would have increased capacity, but it would not have changed the underlying process.
SFL took a different approach.
The Client
The client is a multinational logistics organisation with deep roots in the automotive sector and a leading position in European finished-vehicle logistics. Its wider multimodal network historically extended to 300 destinations across five continents, supporting complex international supply chains at global scale.
The engagement focused on its Australian operation, where high-volume customs processing and carrier-rate administration had become increasingly dependent on manual data entry.
This was precisely the kind of work where scale begins to change the economics. A few hundred lines can be absorbed as administration. Thousands of lines every month become an operating model.
The Challenge: Skilled Teams Were Carrying Clerical Volume
The first pressure point sat in Customs.
Commercial documentation could contain hundreds of individual product lines, each of which needed to be compiled and entered before the customs team could review and submit the declaration. The work was necessary, time-sensitive and unforgiving of poor data quality, but much of the effort itself was clerical.
The second pressure point sat in rate management.
Carrier contracts from truckers, airlines and shipping lines needed to be maintained inside the system for auto-rating and auto-costing to work effectively. Because that maintenance was heavily manual and time-consuming, rates were not always being kept in the system at the level required to support a more automated quoting and costing process.
The same constraint was appearing in two different places: valuable CargoWise functionality depended on data being entered and maintained first.
The client wanted greater throughput without simply increasing local headcount.
The SFL Approach: Separate the Work That Needs Judgement From the Work That Does Not
SFL did not begin by trying to automate everything.
The immediate priority was to remove high-volume data preparation from teams whose time was better spent reviewing, approving and managing exceptions.
Through SFL's back-office service, the repetitive execution layer was moved away from the client's local specialists. That created capacity quickly while also giving SFL a controlled process from which to identify the work that could later be automated.
That distinction remains central to SFL's approach today. Automation is most effective when the process underneath it is structured first: repeatable activity can be system-driven, while human attention remains focused on validation, exception handling and decisions that genuinely require it. SFL's current CargoWise optimisation services specifically target workflow automation, rate optimisation and data-heavy operational processes for this reason.
Phase One: Taking Customs Compilation Out of the Local Team
SFL assumed responsibility for the preparation and entry of customs line-item data.
Rather than asking the Australian customs team to spend hours compiling information before they could perform the actual customs work, SFL's back-office resources prepared the declaration data and updated the individual line items for them. The local specialists remained responsible for the higher-value part of the process: checking the information, resolving issues and submitting the declaration.
Because customs work is time-sensitive and freight does not respect office hours, the support model operated 24/7, 365 days a year, including Sundays, allowing the preparation work to continue around operational deadlines.
At a volume of approximately 8,000 product lines each month, that shift returned 266 hours per month to the client's operation.
The process still had human oversight. It simply stopped using specialist time for the part that did not require specialist judgement.
Phase Two: Making Rate Management Usable at Scale
The same principle was applied to rates and tariffs.
For auto-rating and auto-costing to deliver value, current carrier contracts need to exist inside the system in a form the platform can actually use. In the client's environment, maintaining tariffs from multiple truckers, airlines and shipping lines manually was taking too much time.
SFL initially introduced a managed back-office process to maintain and update the monthly tariffs. That gave Sales and Operations access to more current rate information and created the foundation for more consistent quoting, rating and costing inside CargoWise.
But rate maintenance presented a further opportunity.
Unlike customs declarations, where individual documents can contain considerable variation and still require review, parts of carrier-contract entry were highly repetitive and rule-based. Once the process had been stabilised, SFL moved those elements from manual back-office processing into robotic process automation.
The goal was no longer simply to perform the data entry somewhere else.
It was to remove the repetitive entry itself.
Phase Three: Automating the Volume That No Longer Needed a Person
SFL introduced robotic process automation for key carrier contracts, allowing high-volume tariff information to be processed faster and more consistently.
Approximately 10,000 rate lines per month could now be handled through the redesigned process.
The effect was significant. Rate-processing time fell from six days to two days per cycle, while a further 166 hours of manual effort were removed every month.
That is where the combined model produced its strongest result.
BPO gave the client immediate capacity without adding local overhead. Once SFL understood the process at operating level, automation could then be applied selectively to the high-volume, repeatable work where it produced a genuine advantage.
The service evolved from doing the repetitive work more efficiently to removing a substantial part of that work altogether.
The Results
Across Customs and rate management, the engagement removed 432 hours of manual effort every month from the Australian operation.
- 8,000 customs line items processed each month
Structured back-office support removed approximately 266 hours of monthly data-entry effort, allowing customs specialists to concentrate on validation and submission.
- 10,000 rate lines processed each month
Managed tariff maintenance created a stronger foundation for quoting, auto-rating and auto-costing.
- 166 additional hours saved through automation
Robotic process automation reduced the manual effort required to maintain key carrier contracts.
- 6 days → 2 days
Rate-processing cycle time was reduced by approximately 67%.
- 24/7/365 customs support
Time-sensitive preparation could continue outside the Australian team's normal working hours, including Sundays.
Taken together, the numbers matter because they changed where the client's people were spending their time. Nearly 18,000 lines of recurring data activity each month could be handled without making local specialists absorb the full administrative workload.
How Much Specialist Time Is Still Being Spent on Data Entry?
SFL Tech helps logistics operators redesign data-heavy CargoWise processes across customs, rates, finance and operations through workflow optimisation, automation, integrations and managed support. Today, SFL's CargoWise practice spans more than 800 global projects, 250+ clients and 60+ CargoWise Certified Professionals, with automation and data management positioned as core parts of its optimisation capability.
If high-volume data preparation is still consuming operational capacity, the first question is not whether you need more people. It is whether the work still needs to be done in the same way.
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