Global Trade Fast

Global trade is messy. If you have ever purchased something online from abroad and received a customs form, you know how confusing it is. Do you have to pay duty? Is your good declared at the right price and with the right country? What happens if you get it wrong?

Doing this at scale for companies of all sizes can seem daunting and is close to impossible without planning, organization, and technology. Modern day technologies are able to expedite customs filings, document generation, freight bookings, and pre-shipment required data obtainment. The goal is to generate an assembly-line like process for completing global trade requirements (e.g. determining country of origin, classification, and valuation of the items shipping) against a standardized and unique identifier value for the items shipping.

Technologies are not, however, able to offer fully automated and touch less solutions for 100% of transactions. In innovative and dynamic organizations, the compliance function will not always have the luxury of having clean upstream data to execute compliance workflows. Subject Matter Experts must be optimally positioned within companies in order to intervene in these situations with herculean efforts.

This website will consider how to optimize trade compliance based on a company’s existing supply chain data infrastructure and processes to MOVE THINGS FAST. It will contain articles with global trade subjects that aim to accomplish this such as:

1. Be nimble and leverage existing supply chain data. Free trade agreements and other trade savings are great, but ultimately compliance is a cost center for organizations. Trade is built on information from existing supply chain teams in organizations. A “duct-tape” solution of advanced Google sheets or Azure databases is all a lot of companies need. You’d be surprised how many large organizations already use these.

2. Feedback to upstream teams data requirements. Ultimately compliance is built on existing systems and data that did not originally prioritize compliance. Your responsibility is to create feedback mechanisms to PLM teams, finance teams, r&d teams, procurement teams, legal teams, and brokerage teams to connect data and improve upon the data quality from the respective owner team.

3. Identify processes for “running the business”. This means supporting business needs to ship internationally, fast without burdensome internal processes and without customs clearance issues due to missing information.

4. Prepare to repeat without risk and excess. One-off shipments are a lure. Always expect similar shipments in the near future but with variations. This can be: slightly new items, return of used items, shipments from new manufacturers in new countries, etc. etc. etc. This means you don’t need to worry about adding these mythical one-offs to your upstream ERP systems (yet we’ll discuss markers to identify if this is the right thing to do) but be prepared to maintain and share easily across your team all the baseline information that applies globally such as product descriptions, classifications, values, etc.