World Trade - November 2008 - (Page 46)

SECURITY Necessity: mother of inventive leadership APL’s Annual Security Exercise APL recognizes that the fate of the private sector with respect to response and recovery from a terrorist attack is primarily in the hands of the public sector, including the U.S. Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, ﬁrst responders, and the intelligence community. “However, we at APL believe that sitting back and waiting for them to do their thing is essentially naïve,” notes Earl Agron, vice president of security for the Oakland, California-based international company. “Hope is not a strategy.” APL hosts an annual security meeting and conducts a major security exercise every year. So far, the exercises have been done at different U.S. ports and in Singapore. “We generally have over 100 ﬁrst responders involved,” explains Agron. “When we conduct an exercise in the U.S., we draw in the community by utilizing the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, which is a group of volunteers. Each group conducts its own analysis on our performance and then we review together to discuss lessons learned, where the gaps exist, and where we could see improvements.” One key beneﬁt of these exercises is that they provide an excellent opportunity for government agencies—the ﬁrst responders—to practice on actual vessels in actual APL, and civic and public safety ofﬁcials on the bridge marine terminals, says of an APL vessel at the Port of Oakland during its last Agron. “We learn better ways security exercise in Oakland. to work with ﬁrst responders and better ways of communicating with our customers in case of an evacuation of a terminal.” Although the industry works within the guidelines of the International Ship & Port Facility Security Code (ISPS), APL has taken it to a higher level, says Agron. “Our annual exercises are over and above what the regulations require.” An actual exercise involves an APL ship and its customers’ cargo. “What happens is we simulate an event, after which all of the preparedness strategies fall into place. For instance, our last exercise was done in Oakland and because we are so close to the Lawrence Livermore Lab (LLL), we simulated the discovery of WMD components in a container. We were able to use the expertise of LLL and the ﬁrst responders in a WMD event, which includes a National Guard unit called the Civil Support Team.” “We constantly vary the exercises so we are always learning new things,” Agron reports. APL Tenney. “Without this kind of centralization, companies have no place to report incidents, so that critical intelligence just gets lost.” Trust is truly the keystone in all of these initiatives. “The law enforcement side needs to share intelligence with the industry without compromising its sources,” says Agron at APL. “What is important to recognize is that the private sector is charged with protecting its assets. So we need to have a peek behind what we call the security curtain so that the private sector can take the appropriate countermeasures to protect our infrastructure, which is so critical to the world economy.” 46 WORLD TRADE NOVEMBER 2008 Another significant improvement in supply chain mechanics is brand-to-brand retailer collaboration, notes Ranta at Nike. “We use a risk-based management approach to validate and audit the processes in place in foreign factories we share with other retailers. This means that Nike and another Tier-3 C-TPAT brand can collaborate in auditing and validating those foreign factories, which helps marshal our respective resources.” Collaboration between industry and government continues to improve, reports Ranta. “Prior to 9/11 there was very much an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality between CBP and importers. Now a collaborative environment promotes a serious dialog that didn’t exist before. For instance, we spent a lot of time with them developing C-TPAT.” In the ﬁnal analysis, the international supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link. “We are all interdependent,” states Tenney at Target. “We have a vested interest in ensuring everyone’s supply chain is at least as secure as ours. If something blew up in a Target container, that would be very bad. But if something were to blow up in a Wal-Mart container, that would still be very bad.” Yet another security layer is the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, scheduled to be implemented fully next April (2009). “The program will be signiﬁcant in terms of access control, but it also creates some challenges in assuring that once it is implemented it won’t impede the ﬂow of commerce signiﬁcantly,” notes Cummings. Liddy adds that TWIC is a good step forward in establishing a baseline in the industry. “It offers that layered approach to successful security.” There are still too many different identiﬁcation cards personnel require to access different ports, he notes, and redundancy inhibits efﬁciencies. “So the concept of having one or two types of ID that pre-clears you to access the transportation systems is a good thing.” While not objecting to things like the TWIC card, the trade industry would like to see continued solid support of Customs processes that have been working efﬁciently and cost-effectively, continues Ranta. “We know things like C-TPAT, CSI, and targeted scanning all work. What we fear is that things that work and make sense—like riskbased methodologies—will get lost in this discussion.” Since 9/11, the eyes and ears on the ground continue to notice anomalies that help identify and eliminate threats. “The biggest fear I have is that we become complacent because nothing has happened since implementing these initiatives,” cautions Woodard. “I hope we never see companies asking why we are still using C-TPAT. We should never lose our guard and our awareness.” WT Contributing Editor April Terreri is World Trade Magazine’s trade security correspondent. For reprints of this article, please contact Cindy Williams at williamsc@bnpmedia.com or 610-436-4220 ext. 8516.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Trade - November 2008

World Trade - November 2008 Contents Unexpected Responses to Unanticipated Change Reading the States of Risk in Today’s Global Economy Supply Chain Watch Tradewinds Failed Promise: Mexico and NAFTA, 15 Years Later The Short Tale Marrying Trade Finance and Transportation into a Single Transaction Trucking Gets a Double Whammy Are We Safe Yet? Logistics Resurrects the Rust Belt Keep on Compressing

World Trade - November 2008

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