BluJay Solutions
International Customs Compliance Simplified

Globalization is growing, and so is the logistics industry. The macrocosm of customs clearance is changing dramatically, expanding in the global marketplace with the concept of frictionless borders. To say it’s challenging to keep pace with the change of customs rules and regulations for multiple countries is an understatement. This requires an in-depth understanding of rules for countries involved in the trade process. While the customs stew is sizzling with diverse customs and compliance rules, new pacts, and international trade agreements, managing compliance risk becomes even more difficult. Companies like BluJay assist clients in remaining compliant with international customs ‘with proactive compliance and immediate visibility into exceptions.’

BluJay has four decades of customs management experience and employs 30 certified customs brokers on staff. These experts are not only continually engaged with government agencies; they speak customs language and have a credible voice to influence change. “If you wait for the rules to change, you’re too late. We are active today with government bodies in changing the rules of the future,” says Douglas Braun, CEO of BluJay. “Understanding our customers’ business and challenges gives us the opportunity to make sure their voice is heard in the process.” BluJay takes on the responsibility of making customs clearance easier and faster, communicating the updated rules and regulations to product management, which implements the changes into the product. “We have an entire organization paying attention to customs and compliance so that our customers do not have to think about it; it simply works.” BluJay’s technology streamlines filing to eliminate errors and penalties that result from errors or missing information.

Challenging the orthodoxies of software based on single-country custom clearance, BluJay created a platform to perform multi-country customs clearance with a single user interface (UI) available in local language, while having the corresponding country’s customs clearance. The major advantages of this platform are cost and time efficiency, and elimination of errors and penalties. Since existing data can be reused to create documents within BluJay’s cloud-based solution, the effort required to create a document from scratch is reduced by as much as 70 percent.

We clear roughly about 15 percent of all electronic US customs documents on a daily basis

“We clear about 15 percent of all electronic US customs documents on a daily basis, which is reasonably large in the market, giving us credibility with customers and the US government,” says Braun. BluJay’s Customs Management has been adopted by four of the largest customs clearance organizations in the industry and is expected to expand globally. Currently, the platform is usable for 28 countries and aims to reach 47 countries by the end of 2018. Apart from Customs Management, other applications within BluJay’s Global Trade Network include Transportation Management, Yard Management, and Control Tower, among many other options, with a majority available on desktops as well as mobile devices. To augment its services, BluJay recently acquired Blackbay, a leading provider of mobility-enabled solutions, expanding its mobile services with end-to-end shipment tracking and proof-of-delivery capture, called MobileSTAR.

Recently, a large oil and gas company signed with BluJay to entrust them with handling customs clearance and compliance. The client had a specific need to address customs compliance in Netherlands and Austria. With BluJay, the client successfully carried out the Austrian compliance deployment in November, and the Netherlands is expected to kick-off in January 2018.

Besides broadening its global footprint, BluJay looks to make advancements and continuous improvements to provide more to customers at less cost. From the customer experience perspective, they focus on listening to the voice of customers and protecting customer data while creating value from the anonymized data in the Global Trade Network. “We measure our success by our customers’ success, and so, our development revolves around them,” concludes Braun.