When Brexit created new customs-compliance requirements for Lear Corporation UK, the company needed a way to connect its diverse IT systems to customs declaration filing. Standard options fell short, so — building on an established relationship and Vivansa's customs domain expertise — Lear engaged Vivansa to build a smart Control Tower: specialist middleware that bridges enterprise systems while bringing automation and visibility across customs & trade compliance.
Context & challenges
Lear UK's landscape spanned multiple enterprise systems (ERPs, INET, IC4EDI) that had to feed a customs declaration filing system (MIC-CUST), each with different identifiers and data formats. Off-the-shelf global-trade software couldn't accommodate the complexity, and an in-house build carried real cost and timeline risk against the Brexit deadline.
The operation ran at scale — roughly 8,000 shipments a year and around 20 internal users across departments — so the solution had to be both robust and genuinely usable by trade specialists, with room to extend to other Lear operations later.
Our approach
The build drew on a prior year-long analysis of Lear's business and IT environment, and was organised into four milestones:
- M1 — Parts & Partners master data: a unified view of products, partners, and logistics across their many identifiers.
- M2 — Simplified Frontier Declaration (SFD): coordinating schedules, purchase orders, transport orders and ASNs, transformed for customs filing.
- M3 — Export declaration management: the same automation extended to exports.
- M4 — Supplementary Declaration for Import (SDI): completing the compliance framework.
Throughout, Vivansa worked across three levels of integration that still define the Control Tower approach: technical (managing data transformation and routing with minimal impact on Lear's IT teams), functional (features built around customs practitioners' workflows), and business (change management and continuous improvement).
Outcomes
The smart Control Tower has run in production since 1 April 2022, delivering:
- An efficient customs-data integration approach that reduced demands on Lear's IT team
- Lower development and financial risk than a bespoke in-house build
- A structured transition programme for Lear's Trade Department
- Combined customs-domain and technical expertise in one solution
- A design adaptable to changing regulation and evolving needs
- An expandable architecture ready to extend to Lear operations globally
This implementation became the foundation for Vivansa's R&D — leading to Viictor, which builds on the smart Control Tower's three-layer integration and adds AI: natural-language interaction, continuous compliance support, and intelligent process automation.