World Trade - September 2008 - (Page 49) Selecting the right partners There is no single answer to the type of supplier shippers need in order to prepare for the future. The best approach is to look for service partners that can support multiple modes of transport and truly manage more than just one function of the shipment management process. Shippers must take the time to understand the supplier’s position on how they intend to support future regulations; it is also valuable to fully understand their perspective regarding security, government and industry compliance, shipment monitoring and accountability. Although all of these factors—security, government and industry regulatory demands, the need for greater visibility and accountability—appear to add complexity to the entire process, the underlying infrastructure to support them in fact simplifies it. Despite all the complexities shippers and carriers face today, standardization and Web-based access to (and delivery of) services can play a key role in making it all a great deal simpler and more efficient. By leveraging Web-based technology portals and global networks, it is relatively simple to apply value-added applications to exchange available data to meet specific administrative needs and scale operations to meet demand. The reality of today’s security-focused world is that electronic communications are inevitable, and shippers and logistics service providers have to deal with making James R. Tourtellotte/ U.S. Customs and Border Protection the conversion happen. The question is not so much when, but rather what is the most efficient and costeffective process available to get the job done. WT Oryst Dydynsky is VP Cross Border and Regulatory Affairs at Descartes Systems Group, and Robert Foley is COO at Flagship Customs Services. Dydynsky is responsible for providing trade and technological solutions to streamline the international movement of freight; Foley provides customs compliance technology for electronic. cation super-users wondering if the application master data will still enable them to be trade compliant and what level of regression testing they need to perform to check this. Surprise #3: Has all the data been processed? Trade compliance applications have interfaces with Order Management and Logistics applications. Data that is sent from these applications needs to be processed in a timely manner. While vendors have out-of-the-box or customized interfaces to support the processing of data, they lack tools to display the records that were not processed. Some features that would be great are: • A means of identifying data that was not processed in a particular time frame • Details on which data was successfully and unsuccessfully processed (with error reports on the latter) publishing the change and vendors creating updates/patches for the updates. The patches/updates are time-sensitive and need to be applied to the application within a period of several days. Many vendors post the updates/patches on a secure Web site and ask customers to apply them by using tools within the application. While this is a good approach from the perspective of vendors, it is a time consuming and frustrating process for customers. Customers have to download and apply the patch, and this consumes substantial time and effort. Vendors must enable automatic application of updates/patches. The automated application of updates/patches must inform customers as to where they stand in terms of having the latest compliance data. Patches that were successfully or unsuccessfully applied must be logged into log files to maintain audit trails. Surprise #4: Automated compliance updates anyone? The core of a trade compliance application is compliance master data. Changes to trade regulations leads to government agencies Surprise #5: Missing tools for product classification Governments group information into Harmonized Schedules (HS) and Export Control categories to make imports and exports easy. Companies classify their products into these categories, a process which can be very labor intensive. Because Trade Compliance professionals are always in short supply, companies may find that there is a bottleneck created in the timely import and export classification of products across borders. Technology can alleviate the problem by the use of mass classification utilities. These utilities identify products with similar descriptions and enable their classification in a mass fashion, while at the same time maintaining audit trails. The tools must be able to recommend a list of HS and export license categories based on a word match between the product description and the description of products that have already been classified. After classification has been selected, the tool must be able to update the classification details for a large number of products at the same time. These surprises will give you a good understanding of potential gaps in any trade compliance application. Good luck in your journey! Giridhar Gopal Nagarajan is and experienced supply chain IT professional. He can be reached at giri_us@ yahoo.com. WWW.WORLDTRADEMAG.COM 49 http://www.worldtrademag.com
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