Are your export processes a bit fishy?
Have you ever thought about what’s involved in exporting fish? Strangely enough neither had we. However we recently had the privilege of some very smart business school students from Edinburgh Napier University working with us on a project to look at the impact of Brexit on the UK fishing industry. In particular they wanted to know how fishermen and the fish supply chain companies were dealing with new post Brexit rules and regulations and how their daily operating processes had been impacted.
Well it probably comes as no surprise that things have got much more complex since we left the EU. The process is of course already very time sensitive. Getting a freshly caught Salmon from the net of a Scottish fishing boat all the way to a restaurant table in Paris is very time critical. Brexit has added multiple new regulations and requirements that add further steps to an already lengthy process. For example fishermen must now have a catch certificate and export health certificate (with associated veterinary checks) for every single catch. All documentation is checked at borders with loads being rejected and returned if anything is amiss. Remaining compliant every single time the export process is run for every single catch is vital. This is especially difficult for smaller fishing and export companies that don’t have the manpower resources to stay on top of the many steps and multiple instances of the process that can be running in parallel.
Having got to grips with all the new rules and regulations the Napier Uni student team then modelled the end-to-end process in our Okuda tool and were quickly able to quickly and easily create a working prototype of an automated workflow tool that would help small companies catching and exporting fish to Europe stay on top of the process and ensure they were complaint every single time they carried out an export. You can see a video demo of their solution: https://youtu.be/uD-XdAQbdTs . If you’re struggling to stay on top of a complex import / export process, that has many steps, is super time critical and difficult to keep track of then we’d love to have a chat!
Are your export processes a bit fishy?
