EDI advances speed up border clearance

Surveying the road transport
business into and out of
Swaziland from the perspective
of a principal player on the route for 20
years, Mark Svenningsen, managing
director of Express Cargo, said the
most promising advance had been the
electronic clearance of goods at the
landlocked country’s border posts.
“We at Express Cargo are using
ASYCUDA-PLUS. It’s EDI (Electronic
Data Interchange) and allows electronic
clearing and forwarding via the Asycuda
system. The system was put into place
this year by the customs service. It’s got
the normal teething problems, but it will
bear fruit by shortening transit times at
the border,” said Svenningsen.
Handwritten documents have always
slowed the transport of goods through
border posts, but have become a real
problem as road freight volumes from
SA have increased. Swaziland’s EDI
system has been in operation for enough
months for customs agents to perform
reasonably well with it as the annual
upswing in shipping hits.
“We are coming up to the busy
season, from September onward to mid-
December,” said Svenningsen.
For the road freight consolidator
that keeps a fleet of local collection
and delivery vehicles and 20 longhaul
Super Link trucks busy on its
daily route to and from Gauteng from
Swaziland (the trucks are also used to
service Express Cargo’s routes from
its Johannesburg facility to and from
Botswana and Lesotho), volume is
down from last year.
“It’s the recession. We see it in our
overall service. White goods, clothing,
and the other items we mainly transport
are down,” said Svenningsen.
But long-time shippers have remained
with the long-established Swaziland
road transporter.
“Customers have come to depend on
our reliability,” said Svenningsen.