CUSTOMS CLEARANCE BUILT FOR A MARKET THAT CHANGED OVERNIGHT

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Work > Digicom Customs

Digicom Customs operate in trade and customs, where a wrong commodity code means seizure, not delay. Their customers are hauliers moving goods between Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the rest of Europe, on schedules that can't absorb a held load.

Digicom came to us with a regulatory deadline and a window. Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol had rewritten the rules of cross-border movement. International software vendors were already moving to fill the gap. The question was whether a UK and Ireland-focused platform, built by people who actually understood the corridor, could get to market first.

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THE PROBLEM

An entire industry needed customs declarations it had never previously had to file, and the tools to do it didn't exist yet. Digicom had been managing customs and haulage through largely manual processes.
After Brexit, that model didn't scale:

Large Admin Time

A large consignment took around two hours of admin time to process before any goods moved.
Disconnected Workflows

Declarations had to flow through three separate government systems. CDS in GB, TSS for Northern Ireland, and Irish Revenue for ROI. Each had its own format, its own quirks and its own data requirements.
Market Race

International vendors were circling the same opportunity. Whoever shipped first would shape what hauliers expected from the category.
Logistical Shifts

To avoid the new GB-to-Ireland customs burden, hauliers were routing loads through France and Spain to take advantage of free movement. A direct trip was being replaced by a longer, more expensive, more carbon-intensive one because the paperwork made it cheaper to drive further.

What Digicom needed wasn't a digital version of the customs form. They needed a platform that could absorb the regulatory complexity, integrate with every relevant government system, and ship fast enough to define the market before someone else did.

WHAT WE BUILT

A bespoke web platform that creates, tracks and manages customs declarations for hauliers across Europe.

A cargo ship carrying containers sailing on the ocean during a vibrant sunset with colorful clouds in the sky.

01. A web portal.

Administrators and hauliers log in, create declarations, import job data, monitor progress and manage clearances end-to-end through a single interface designed around how the work actually flows.
02. Direct integrations with CDS, TSS and Irish Revenue.

Declarations submitted through Digicom move directly into the relevant government system, rather than being re-keyed across platforms by hand.
03. A workflow that strips out the manual layer.

Complex loads that used to take hours have been broken down into structured flows. Data import shortcuts remove the duplicate entry that used to dominate the process.
04. Built to flex.

Customs regulation doesn't sit still. The platform was designed from day one to absorb regulatory change without rebuilding the underlying system, and we stayed close enough to the client to respond as the rules shifted.

WHAT CHANGED

01.

Simple loads now clear in under 2 minutes

02.

Complex loads now clear in under 20 minutes (previously around 2 hours)

03.

Digicom's admin team has been redeployed from manual data entry into sales and business development

04.

Hauliers can now ship directly from mainland GB to Ireland rather than routing through France and Spain, saving cost, time and carbon

05.

Approximately £20 saved per declaration, with a potential industry-wide saving of £518 million across the 25.9 million declarations between GB and Europe

The platform is now central to how Digicom's clients move goods across the GB, NI and ROI corridor.

WHY IT WORKED

Digicom didn't come to us with a feature list. They came with a regulatory deadline and a market window. Our job was to understand the operation well enough, fast enough, to make sure that when the customs software category got defined, it got defined by them.

We spent the time with their customs team learning where time was actually being lost in the manual process, where the regulatory edge cases lived, and where international vendors building generic platforms were going to fall short. The platform that came out of that encodes the specifics of GB, NI and ROI customs the way Digicom's people understand them. It moves with regulation rather than breaking against it. And because we've stayed close since launch, it has continued to evolve as the rules, the routes and the business have.