PF Collins

Deborah Osborne, Vice President, Customs and Consulting from PF Collins, explains how the Descartes Canadian Customs Brokerage™ solution is helping the company optimize processes and reduce labor with smart workflow automation, alerting, and flagging capabilities.

“PF Collins is a family-owned Canadian business with over 100 years of operation. We’re known for our customer service and compliance. We have a freight department and a marine agency division that goes hand-in-hand with the ships that come into the Port of St. John's for the oil and gas industry.”

“We have flags in the Descartes system for quality control based on varying parameters. For example, there are pop-ups to check the Special Import Measures Act (SIMA) list, verify a sanction, or determine if a tariff treatment should be different. If a shipment is over a given dollar value or certain duties and taxes apply, the Descartes solution will send it off for verification.”

“The solution also monitors for regulatory changes. For example, depending on what the change is, such as a new SIMA product, the system has a place to enter parameters to specify that a tariff will trigger an alert. If we did not have these flags, we would then need to rely wholly on human intervention. With so many regulatory, sanctions, and tariff changes, it would be a lot for a person to review each shipment every time which could carry heavy penalties if we got it wrong.”

“The Descartes system improves our workflow, increases compliance, and brings down the number of rejects. Every time you touch a file, it's money, so it is best to do everything up front, do it right the first time, and use Descartes' automation services. We have configured the system to automatically release and send to customs except for certain cases where a shipment is reviewed before paying the duties and taxes and automatic billing.”

“Even with auto bill, some clients want to have billing monthly, weekly, or per shipment. All of that is also factored-in and placed in an automation process. If we had to perform this manually, we’d need three times the staff. Using the automation within the solution, the process is smooth—it auto bills, gathers all the documents, emails the client without human intervention.”

With intuitive automations throughout daily workflow, labor is freed to work on value-added tasks

Information is repurposed and re-used to boost data integrity

Information is seamlessly transmitted to customs to speed shipment clearance

The solution can meet the specific needs of clients to match their billing requirements

Established in 1921, PF Collins is a leading Canadian provider of integrated international trade and project logistics services. With a head office in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador, a secondary office in Halifax, NS, and Sales Representatives and Import Raters in numerous provinces, the company delivers a suite of integrated services in Canada and around the world.

Learn more at https://pfcollins.com.