With its two globally renowned brands, Peugeot and Citroën, PSA Peugeot Citroën sold more than 3.5 million vehicles worldwide in 2011. As Europe's second largest carmaker, the group generated revenues of €59.9 billion. PSA has sales operations in 160 countries, 16 production facilities - including joint ventures - and more than 209,000 employees worldwide.
Currently, with an estimated volume of around 200,000 customs declarations per year, PSA is one of the largest customs declarants in France. Considering PSA's global scope, the need for a global customs software provider became more and more relevant over the past years.
Jean-Philippe Lacroix, Director Customs & Foreign Trade (Directeur Douane et Commerce Extérieur), says, "It is not only about handling that considerable amount of French customs declarations, we also have international customs needs. This requires a customs software provider with the capacity to innovate."
PSA’s International Customs Needs Demanded a New Approach
PSA’s customs IT environment and services (for France) had been outsourced to a third party customs service provider so far. When it came to PSA’s international needs for an international rollout it turned out that this provider was technically not able to provide an IT environment for a rollout into other countries and that its future IT roadmap did not meet PSA’s requirements, as well.
”We started looking for a customs software provider at the very beginning of 2011. It should be a service provider with experience and recognition in the automotive industry, offering a multi-country customs software as basis for rollouts into other countries than France and with the capability to create innovative solutions e.g. Software as a Service“, states Jean-Philippe Lacroix.
Why MIC?
By evaluating the key decision criteria, MIC soon was considered to be the only customs software provider who was able to fulfill PSA’s sophisticated requirements. To verify its impression, PSA contacted a reference client out of MIC’s large OEM customer base who had the desired SaaS solution already in place.
Jean-Philippe Lacroix explains, “Our IT department wanted to hear at first-hand about the experience with MIC’s SaaS customs solution from a company in the same industry. Together we set up some general questions but also some very industry specific ones. We were rather astonished that all of these had been answered by MIC’s reference client which is in fact a competitor to us. However, they pictured a very positive image of MIC’s SaaS customs solution: easy to implement, simple to roll out into other countries and able to process large volumes – everything on a single multinational customs filing platform with IT-costs that are calculable.”
Finally, it was MIC’s demonstrated professionalism, reliability and seriousness which convinced PSA to choose MIC as its new customs software provider.
Faster than scheduled – Go live took place 1 week earlier!
The challenge of this project was not to implement the required MIC modules (Import, export, inward processing relief, outward processing relief and central product tariff classification) for PSA’s French customs operation, but to replace the services of the third party customs service provider. A huge data volume had to be migrated to MIC’s SaaS environment and to be converted into Unicode which facilitates the usage of all current data sets which are necessary to file customs declarations globally.
Additionally numerous new interfaces to PSA’s system landscape had to be set up. This was facilitated by MIC’s module EDIS (Electronic Data Integration System), which provides flexible integration with customer’s ERP and legacy systems as well as automation of customs processes.
”The project went smoothly and without big issues. Go live was on December 3rd 2011 which was one week earlier than scheduled. To be honest, this was a rather new experience to us because normally a project like this would be finished with delay … ,” explains Jean-Philippe Lacroix.
Benefits of MIC’s SaaS Solution according to Jean-Philippe Lacroix:
- “The system availability, stability and performance have totally improved as well as the security of data. The processing time of a shipment has been reduced by 4-times in comparison to the existing solution. This saves a lot of time that can be used for other activities.”
- “We could reduce resources and therefore operational costs as well.”
- “We now have the possibility to use a centralized customs solution on a single technical platform for rollouts into other countries. Besides this, we continuously meet all legal requirements with reduced effort due to the maintenance model provided by MIC. This guarantees that MIC accurately implements legal changes in time, as required by the various national customs administrations.”
- “There is no need to take care of the IT landscape because this is part of MIC’s responsibility as well.”