World Trade - September 2008 - (Page 48) SECURITY requirements. With the right information in hand, forwarders and carriers can improve compliance activities as well as customer service. The tools that are now available through third-party providers allow freight forwarders to monitor the status of shipments at any time in the process and easily communicate that information in realtime to all the required parties. A third-party approach resolves a number of critical challenges. For one, it reduces the risk and capital cost of developing and maintaining in-house systems, while ensuring access to the appropriate functionality for the business operation. In addition, it eliminates the need for infrastructure re-engineering and provides continuous availability. Business processes can easily and quickly be streamlined through third-party solutions and information can be consolidated, verified and transmitted automatically, eliminating the need to manually collect and re-key any information, thereby reducing the risk of errors or omissions. Third-party services also ensure that the necessary levels of enforcement are practiced in the filing process and that shipments meet compliance requirements. This will become increasingly important as border agencies begin to impose penalties for non-compliance. In addition, the flexibility and scalability of these types of solutions will prove useful in helping carriers address the up and coming 10+2 initiative. The 10+2 initiative requires additional data in the marine mode to be provided to CBP’s Advance Trade Data Automated Manifest System (AMS) at least 24 hours before a ship is loaded at a foreign port. As electronic filing mandates expand to other countries, it is imperative they have access to a solution that can be readily and seamlessly expanded. Having Web-based access to real-time information also enables organizations to improve operational efficiencies since they can plan for arrivals or delays based on accurate and timely information. If, for example, a shipment is delayed by a few hours at customs, measures can be taken to adjust pick-up schedules and notify the customer of the delay. This not only improves customer service, it also helps to reduce wait times and wasted asset utilization. When one combines this real-time visibility with performance management, reporting and alert messaging, forwarders can make great strides in increasing the security and screening of all air cargo shipments at a relatively affordable cost. All these factors lead to the issue of accountability. With standardized processes and end-to-end visibility, there is little room left for error—or excuses. Shippers and logistics service providers know where the goods are, who is in control of those goods at that point in time and the anticipated arrival of the goods. Ultimately, this means that organizations can assume full accountability for their service commitments and communicate regularly and more effectively. Five Surprises from a Trade Compliance Application You have recently implemented a trade compliance application in-house or have outsourced your needs to an Application Service Provider. You and your boss are obviously elated as you have cut down on thousands of hours of manual work and reduced the percentage of errors. This is great news! You realized that this is the first step in the right direction and that there are many more miles to go in this journey. But, as with all system innovations, you know there will be surprises you will encounter while using the application. Here are five to be ready for: archive your data. Most vendors do not have readily available tools to purge and archive your data. If you have an in-house implementation, you will have to work on a 3-month to 1-year project. The objectives of such a project would be: • To safely purge and archive your old transactional data • To be able to retrieve this data and provide it to auditors during an audit or investigation A data purge and archive tool is a great tool to have as part of the Trade Compliance application suite. Here are some of the features that constitute the cutting edge: • The ability to safely purge and archive thousands of rows from a production database • An easy-to-use interface that will allow the selection of data to be archived • An interface able to show the progress of archiving, and after it is completed, display the number of rows of data that are successfully purged and archived BY GIRIDHAR GOPAL NAGARAJAN Surprise #2: Compliance updates may set you back Most applications have tables where master compliance data is stored. Trade compliance data providers provide patches or data updates to update these tables. Vendors have their own database where they store the latest copy of the master data. When a change to compliance data takes place, some vendors take the easiest route and provide an update that wipes out the entire tables and reinserts the data. This essentially means that they are cleaning your slate and writing their latest compliance data on it. This process poses risks in the following cases: • You have modified the master compliance data in consultation with you vendor. All these changes will be wiped out. You will have to reenter your custom compliance data. • The vendor has not been diligent enough to apply all updates to their database. The clean slate approach leaves the appli- Surprise #1: Tools for data archiving, where are you? You are currently at the starting line. As years progress the amount of transactional data you have in your application will grow. After some years, adding more data will slow down the retrieval of data from the application. This is the point at which the brainstorming session for improving performance will start. A good solution for this problem is to purge and 48 WORLD TRADE SEPTEMBER 2008
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.