There are hopes that an electronic road manifest will be rolled out for all consignments at all the Namibian borders to “greatly enhance and improve the overall transit and movement process between South Africa and Namibia”, according to Global Trade Solution’s (GTS) Magda Hugo.
GTS was the first software vendor to pilot and operationalise road manifest functionality for cargo transport between South Africa and Namibia, she told FTW.
Following the successful completion of a pilot project in conjunction with the Namibian Customs Authority and a private sector partner providing transport and warehousing services, the road manifest requirements were activated by the Namibian Customs Authority.
Hugo told FTW that the pilot project had taken place during the third quarter of 2017. The project went live in the latter part of 2017 at the dedicated Namibia Customs office which was established at the private sector partner’s premises in Windhoek. GTS engaged with the Namibian authorities and co-created the new road manifest functionality following similar principles to those being used by the broader Southern African Customs Union (Sacu) membership states.
“Essentially, we adopted the same process that the South African Revenue Service (Sars) follows on the South African side, but at the same time adhered to the specific requirements and needs of the Namibian authority. By simplifying the process on the South African and Namibian side we were able to cut down the average document processing time of 2-4 hours to 15 minutes through the use of a fully integrated system,” explained Hugo.
She said that the time-saving aspect, as well as the increased level of compliance, were some of the “big wins” around the simplification of the electronic road manifest requirements into Namibia.
“There are multiple agencies involved in the export-import process which generates a lot of duplicate work that is normally captured manually,” explained Hugo, pointing out that one truck could carry up to 30 consignments.
“You can imagine the time it takes to capture every consignment manually and then create the manifest.” Hugo added that in GTS’s experience it took between two hours and eight hours to process a single truck when capturing manually.
“By simplifying and automating the process this time has been reduced to a mere 15 minutes,” she said. Furthermore, the activation of the electronic manifest enhanced the data integrity by eliminating the risk of “human error” and therefore the overall risk management across the supply chain was greatly improved, said Hugo.
She said the success of the pilot project should serve as motivation for the deployment of the functionality at all of the Namibian border posts. In view of the Customs-to-Customs (C2C) connectivity that is being planned for the near future within the Sacu block, the activation of the road manifest at all of the Namibian border posts should be prioritised, she added.
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We were able to cut down the average document processing time from 2-4 hours to 15 minutes by using a fully integrated process. – Magda Hugo
