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.