CHB USA
The first business unit outside 3PL: the customs brokerage in the United States. It runs on the
same base as Operations 2.0 (sessions, permissions, design) with its own data, pulled directly
from the system the team works in.
My roleInterview, design, and development
Used byCHB management and team leads
SourceACE Suite, through n8n
StatusFirst release, Nov 2026
Why it exists
The team works across two branches, and measuring its work depended on reports built by hand
from the system. It started with an interview with the unit's director: what they file, what
they review every week, and what is hard to put together. The first release shipped a week later.
- Operations. Entries, inbonds, SEDs, ISF, e-manifest, and invoices by day, person,
client, and branch, against the previous period or the same period last year.
- Findings. Errors found when reviewing operations: Pareto, who misses what, and the
rate per 100 operations. Logging one looks up the file number and brings back who keyed it
and for which client.
- Clients, team, and finance. Volume against profitability by client, each person's
pace against their best month, and what is still to be collected, with its aging.
- Excel and PDF reports. The ones they already used (with new columns at the end)
and others they did not have: statement of account, profit by client and month, billing to
date, and clients that stopped operating.
Where the data comes from
01ACE SuiteSQL Server, read only
02n8nquery grouped by day
0310-min copyinside the workflow
04Sessionper-unit permission
05Browsercalculations and reports
The queries against the operations system take about 40 seconds. So nobody waits for them,
n8n keeps the last response, returns it right away, and refreshes it in the background every
10 minutes during office hours. Findings live in their own table.
Build decisions
- Reconcile before showing. Every figure was checked against the reports the director
already used; their columns come first and unchanged, and anything new goes at the end.
- Separate data. CHB has its own workflow and a read-only credential; it shares no
source with the rest of the company.
- Rate, not count. Findings are compared per 100 operations, so the people who do the
most work are not penalized for it.
- Automatic work apart. Invoices and SEDs the system sends on its own do not count as
a person's work.
What is different in this demo
It is the same file that runs in production, with the data layer replaced by a generator. The
rules, calculations, and reports are the real ones.
- People, users, clients, amounts, and file numbers are fictitious.
- Looking up a file number when logging a finding makes up a plausible operation for it.
- Anything logged or changed is kept only while the page is open.
- Export to Excel is disabled in the demo.
TypeScriptViteAutomated testsn8n
SQL ServerMySQL