Customs Compliance Is Not Just a Requirement. It's a Tool.

Mota, ALS's in-house customs management system, has been extended this year with Mota Compliance: a capability that checks HS codes and descriptions for integrity, applies country-specific prohibitions and restrictions, verifies duty preferences, and screens all parties against Denied Party Screening databases. 

AI Intelligent Document Processing extracts data from commercial documents, reducing errors at source. Critically, ALS has worked with its AI provider to build Human in the Loop review functions specifically for customs compliance, checking weights, origins, values, and supplier statements before any declaration is submitted.

ALS operates in one of the most highly regulated sectors in global trade. The company has developed an in-house eLearning platform that supports onboarding, yearly compliance refreshers, and targeted training based on post-clearance checks and audit findings. 

Modules cover what compliance means in practice, why it matters, and how to identify and manage risk day-to-day. External programmes, including BIFA training for import and export declarations, are compulsory for all UK declarants.

This is ALS's most significant initiative. Working with the Open Logistics Foundation, a non-profit where major logistics and customs players collaborate on open-source software, ALS co-leads the Open Customs working group. 

The team developed GPID (Goods Passport ID): a secured key dataset that concentrates on the data fields most critical to compliance, sourced directly from the seller and designed to be tamper-proof. This was selected by the EU's European Blockchain Services Infrastructure as a test case for its regulatory sandbox.