International trade is rapidly gaining strength again. In the last couple of months, it has been nothing but surviving for your company. However, now, it seems there is a glimmer of light on the horizon: foreign productions have started up again, the number of orders is rising and the prices in airfreight are going back to normal. Time for you to set your house in order and to focus on the future again. However, how do you make sure that you will not face anymore, unnecessary, financial setbacks? Use cues to prevent extra costs or fines as a result of customs documents you have declared too late.

Never miss a deadline again

When working with transit documents, it is of great importance that the correct actions are taken on time. Only then, you can prevent financial consequences like extra costs or fines. Insights into the documents that you’ve made or received are of great value. With the help of cues in your role center – and combining the new time functions with the declaration status – you can directly see on your role center what actions need to be done. For example, you immediately have a clear overview of the number of transit arrival documents (NL044) or a transit departure documents with the status NL029.

Cues in your role center

What tiles you show in your role center, and therefore what information you want to display, is completely up to you. In the example underneath, we will dive deeper into the cues for transit arrival documents and transit departure documents

Cues that you can use in your role center can be found in the image below. The image shows the following tiles:

1. Tr. Arrival 24-48H: documents with the declaration status NL043, of which the arrival notification date is between 24 hours and 48 hours ago.
2. Tr. Arrival >48H: documents with the declaration status NL043, of which the arrival notification date is more than 48 hours ago. Because an NL044 status needs to be sent in less than 72 hours, actions in this tile need to be handled quickly.
3. Tr. Departure >4D: documents with the declaration status NL029, of which the date of acceptance is more than four days ago.

Directly undertake action

When you use these cues, you can directly see which actions need your attention. Furthermore, you can click on the tiles, after which you can complete the activity right away. For example, you can click on the tile ‘Tr. Arrival >48H’, select the desired action, and send an NL044 status in less than a minute

Setup your cues

With the use of cues, you gain direct insight into your departure and arrival documents in your role center, but how do you set these up?

1. Select your cues

First of all, you have to choose what cues you want to display in your role center. To do so, you go to ‘WMS Processor Activity Setup’.

In this example, we have chosen cues two, three, and seven. Preferably, you must set up cues that are not in use yet. If there are no tiles available, then you can use a specific user-id or profile-id to set up cues specifically for that user or profile. Furthermore, you can choose the label of the tile yourself.

2. Request the correct information

To use the right information in your cues, you must link the cues to the correct table and page. To refer to the correct table with transit documents you fill in ‘11154859’ as table number and ‘11191380’/’11191381’ as page id.

Now you have set up the cue with the correct lists out of which the information is drawn. To display specific data on your tiles, you must create a filter for relevant documents.

3. Filter your data

To set a filter, you go to ‘Process’ > ‘Filter lines’. This opens a new tab.

In order to filter, two fields are important: the ‘Declaration status’ and the ‘Arrival Notification Date’ (or ‘date of acceptance’, depending on departure or arrival documents). These fields are filled in under ‘field name’ (1). Then, you distinguish the type of filter (2) and the value of the filter (3). For the field ‘Declaration Status’, the value of the filter is a fixed value. In this case ‘NL043’ (4).

When filling in the value for the field ‘Arrival Notification Date’, you use a date/time function as the value. The recently developed time functions that you use here, are specifically designed to use filters over a short period of time. For example, over only 48 hours, like in this example.

Your filter, always up-to-date

As can be seen in the description of the filters in the image above, the filter is applied to the present time of your system. From this time, the function calculates the number of hours before that. When you refresh your role center, the time is refreshed as well. Therefore, your overview contains the most recent information

Give strength to your cues

When you have set up all your cues to your preference, you can also choose to color tiles when they fall into a certain filter. For example, you can color a tile red when more than one action is open in the cue. This has also been applied in the first image of this blog.

To add colors to your tiles, you can follow these steps:

1. Go to ‘Cue setup’
2. Fill in the name of the cue
3. Determine the color of the tile, when it has a certain value
4. Determine the threshold for coloring the tile. When you want to color the tile directly when an action is open, you choose a threshold of 1,00.

Set up cues in your own 3PL Dynamics environment

Do you want to start working with cues for your customs activities? Or do you want to learn more about the possibilities for other customs declarations? Mail to support@elevate-it.be, we will gladly help you on your way.