On April 1st 2021, Egypt launched NAFEZA to facilitate and expedite the review and release of foreign shipments upon their arrival at a port of entry within Egypt. All details about NAFEZA can be found here .

Advance Cargo Information (ACI) is a small part of the overall NAFEZA. ACI is a new customs procedure that requires cargo data or documents (Pro-forma invoice and draft bill of lading-if exist) at least 48 hours before cargo shipment from export country, to enable stakeholders to monitor any risk to the state through the Risk Management System (RMS), with the highest priority given to the security of Egyptian citizens.

The ACI declaration process include many steps, well documented on NAFEZA website:

We have been asked by our customers to automate the creation of the cargo data and documents (bullet point 4 in above list), all of them having an SAP ERP system.

All the detailed documents specification are available here .

If you have time to read the specification, you will understand that the challenge is to create commercial invoice in a structured, NAFEZA-specified XML or Excel(XLS/XLSX), format.

One approach is too used the the RPA converter service proposed on Nafeza website, unfortunately none of our customer where successful with this service. We haven't been asked to look at it, so I can't say much about this service, maybe the invoice format of our customers were too complex.

So we basically took the option of creating the excel file ourselves with our bots. The file template can be found here .

Bear in mind that the ACID number need to be requested prior, as this information will not be coming from your ERP.

In a nutshell the process is not complicated, we generate a specific Idoc when NAFEZA declaration is required. Then our boat is reading/parsing the Idoc and generating the excel file with all required information. Then we create a bundle which includes the other required files, drop everything in a specific share file drive for people in charge to upload the document in Cargo-X portal when required.

The only challenge on this approach is to not break the excel template provided by NAFEZA. This excel file has many predefined and calculated fields that are mandatory for NAFEZA to be able to process the document, any of them missing will make the upload and processing on the NAFEZA portal failed. So if you want to reproduce this approach, keep that detail in mind when generating the excel file.

On average, per declaration, our bot help our customers save 10 min of human time. Of course this depends on the number of line item that need to be declared. If you only have one line per declaration, then this bot will not help you save much time per declration, but maybe on the volume. For the time saving mentioned above, we noticed an average of 15 line items per declaration.

This bot has been added to our library and available for any of our customers. If you have any question and/or would like to use it, feel free to contact us.