Notice of Arrival ( NOA )

When the goods close to arrival at destination the notice of arrival or NOA will be performed by forwarding agent to be forwarded to importer. This notice of arrival containing the details of shipment and importer has to check strictly the contents till importer feels in no doubt.

The valid data on NOA is a must to ensure the customs clearance to be going easy and smoothly. For especially in description of goods and the consignee and shipper name. Better importer making the description of goods with the same description on all shipping documents, for instance, importer has a description " Yarns, 100 % Linen ", then shipper should mentions it on the invoice, packing list, bill of lading or house air waybill, and others documents are requested. This way to do is protecting to any possibility customs problems coming up. Not only the description of goods in uniform, the other data shown on documents should be uniformed, too.

Forwarding agent will follow the NOA to submit the data manifest to customs. It's mean that if the data in NOA is wrong this will leads to customs problem due to there are discrepancies between the goods and the data manifest.

We have ever got a problems concerning the difference data of consignee name. Forwarding agent did not sent us the NOA or the draft of data, we did not check the data manifest prior to submitted. Unfortunately, between data manifest and data on bill of lading is not uniform.The difference is only one letter. On the bill of lading wrote "GARMEN", contrary manifest showed "GARMENT". This difference is only on "T" letter, then this leaded to the customs process longer than common done. This took one week additional times for clearance and of course, this leaded to the additional warehouse fee or charges and such additional handling fee came to our account. So that the correction before the data submitted to the system is a must to do to avoid the additional times and charges happened.

Additionally, at the same time our production having very short time to the delivery date. Because the row material  came late, we should took overtime to finish the goods in time or to reach the delivery date buyer decided. Then the result is a higher production cost came up. Moreover, we had to air parts quantity left because this parts was not finish and can be delivered in time then buyer had decided the part of quantity left to be going aired. Unfortunately, the cost of air freight was came to our account or the term shipment was on prepaid.

This case gives us experience that we should extra strictly to follow up our importation and proactively keep in touch with forwarding agent and we have to get all the drafts of shipping documents before all the documents are issued up and prior to the shipper  ship out the goods.