"Think like the customer" reads a large sign near the office entrance of United Parcel Services' Kowloon Bay Cargo Centre, the logistical nerve centre of the company's Hong Kong operations.

The message provides the 350 UPS staff working there with a constant reminder of the company's core philosophy - that in the highly competitive world of courier and express parcel delivery, the key to winning and retaining business is constantly looking for new ways to meet customers' needs and enhance the levels of service they are offered.

It's a philosophy that extends right through the UPS business, not only covering the areas of direct interface with the customer but also the company's 'behind the scenes' operations, which play an important role in meeting the UPS promise of fast, reliable delivery, wherever the destination.

The use of electronic commerce is a key component of this, helping UPS to provide a faster, more efficient service to customers as well as a sophisticated tracking facility that allows the progress of every document or parcel to be monitored throughout its journey.

So with much of the company's documentation already computerised, UPS did not need much persuasion to transfer their trade declaration lodgement to EDI when Tradelink launched the ValuNet service in April 1997.

"We would have liked to be one of the very first Tradelink customers," says Simon Ho, assistant supervisor of the Cargo Centre, "but it wasn't practicable as the initial DOS software had a number of limitations for companies like ours, who handle the trade documentation for many hundreds of different customers."

Instead, UPS worked closely with Tradelink in helping to develop the Windows version of the software, ValuNet Standard, which was launched in mid-July.

This co-operation echoed a similar situation five years earlier, when UPS played a role in helping Customs and Excise Department to develop their software for the Diskette Submission Scheme (DSS), which has now been superseded by Tradelink's EDI service.
"We had no real complaints about using the DSS for our lodgements but Tradelink's service certainly makes the process even easier," Mr Ho says. "Apart from the fact that we don't have to take the diskettes and payment to the Government collection centre any more, we particularly like the Search feature in ValuNet Standard which makes it very simple to locate a particular declaration if the customer has a query. The calculation of lodgement charges is also much faster and we can update the codes very easily."

UPS has a team of 10 people working exclusively on shipping documentation and frequently lodges more than 200 trade declarations in a day. Using ValuNet Standard, they can now prepare a typical declaration in as little as 20 seconds. The declarations are usually sent to Tradelink in two batches at around 11.30 am and 5.00 pm each day, allowing time to check for any errors and rectify them before the end of the working day. However, as a matter of good housekeeping, Mr Ho explains, they always log in to Tradelink every 30 minutes to check for mailbox messages.

Mr Ho gives "full marks" to the back-up service provided by Tradelink at all levels. "As a service company ourselves, we think in the same way as Tradelink," he points out. "We recognise that with any new service there are bound to be some teething problems that you can't anticipate until the situation arises. The important thing is that you work together to solve the problem as quickly as possible and ensure that your service to the customer remains unaffected - you can wait until later to find out why it happened.

"The concept of teamwork is very important within UPS and we consider Tradelink as part of our team. We look forward to working with them on other new services like the Certificate of Origin and Manifest because we see the ValuNet service not as an end product, but just the beginning of a complete transition of the import/export business to electronic commerce over the coming years.

"I'd like to see more organisations put an emphasis on teamwork," Mr Ho says. "If Hong Kong's trading community is to remain prosperous in the future, it's important that we all work together as a team."