PMS International (Far East) Ltd's Kowloon showroom is crammed with tens of thousands of types of toys - hard and soft, and in every imaginable size, shape and colour - plus a huge array of household goods, novelties and gifts. The company's business of exporting these goods throughout the world is complex, but has been made easier by Tradelink's electronic trade declaration services.

PMS International participates actively in Europe's biggest toy fairs and exhibitions but, if you imagine that, with those credentials, it is a major multinational enterprise, you'd be quite wrong. In fact, PMS qualifies as a small-to-medium enterprise (SME), the type that typifies Hong Kong's import/export trading community. It employs 41 people in a combined office/showroom that is tucked away in a Tsim Sha Tsui commercial building.

While sales are handled primarily by the parent company in Britain and manufacturing is carried out in joint venture factories in mainland China, PMS's Hong Kong staff handle merchandising, sampling, quality control and fulfillment, in addition to much of the marketing and administration.

"Actually, quite a lot of the goods leave direct from Shenzhen, Shantou, Huangpu and Shanghai without ever coming into Hong Kong, although we still handle a large part of the paperwork from here," explains PMS supervisor Brenda Wong. "However, the majority do come through Hong Kong. Often we will source one order from different manufacturers and then consolidate it here."

All this amounts to a mass of shipping documentation so it's a surprise to learn that there are only five people in the shipping department to handle it. Each shipping staff member has a PC dedicated to their particular company and is responsible for arranging shipping dates, issuing the banks letters of credit and submitting government import and export declarations.

As shipping supervisor, Brenda is responsible for signing all declarations - which add up to more than 100 each month. These are mostly export declarations, as PMS's suppliers usually bring the goods into Hong Kong.

"It's definitely been a lot easier since we started using ValuNet to lodge the declarations electronically," says Brenda. "It saves time and we know if there are any rejections almost immediately. We also save on the cost of courier services. Even though we're quite close to the government's Kowloon Collection Office, we still needed a courier and we knew the collection office would close on 1 October 1999.

"In January, we started using ValuNet, which gave Tradelink time to sort out any teething problems and didn't leave it too late for us. At first, the staff were concerned but they got used to it very quickly, and now they all find it much quicker and easier than filling in paper declarations. We don't handle any other shipping documents electronically at the moment, but I'm sure that will change in the next year or so," Brenda says. "Already we communicate with a lot of our customers via the Internet, so handling more purchasing and shipping documents this way is the next logical step," she adds.

This year, PMS opened a new office in the USA and they are doing more business there, as well as organising exhibitions. This will probably hasten their automation process as e-commerce is a common way of doing business in the US.

Appropriately, one of PMS's biggest lines at the moment is Millennium 2000 merchandise, which they designed and commissioned mid-1998 - in the fast-moving world of toys and novelties, it always pays to keep one step ahead.