What to do with a global trade software patchwork

For many companies, internationalisation was a driver of success over recent years: new customers, new revenues, and new markets.

They have either opened new offices in foreign markets, worked with local partners, or acquired local competitors. The latter holds a great advantage, as it means acquiring a new client base. There is a snag, however: managing parallel business processes, products, and IT systems is a very complex endeavour – and a costly one at that. When businesses merge, one type of IT solution in particular tends to be left behind in integration projects: global trade software.
 
What’s the reason for that? Well, when it comes to customs, all countries have their own processes and national peculiarities. And every single national customs authority has individual systems and very specific IT procedures. While Germany uses ATLAS, the Netherlands deploys AGS, NCTS and Portbase, and the United Kingdom works with CHIEF – a system that is planned to be replaced in 2017.

Many companies deal with such decentralised customs structures on a global level by using local, national solutions. This means all of their global sites managing import or export shipments have their own customs teams, run independent customs systems, and are familiar with local customs specifics. Some companies also outsource some or all of their customs management to local customs brokers in order to avoid managing in-house customs systems altogether. Basically, it’s a disjointed, global network of many small “customs system silos”.
 
Unsurprisingly, managing such fragmented processes on a global level is expensive and labour-intensive. From an IT perspective, the procurement, maintenance, and support of these individual global trade solutions is a costly problem that also comes with a lack of transparency. It’s a major challenge to uniformly manage the classification of goods on a company-wide level, to give just one example. Central customs management offers clear benefits.

So, rather than operating a number of disjointed, local customs systems, companies could establish a uniform, international customs platform for their customs management in different countries and locations. One platform for all – with central benefits and local flexibility. Of course such platforms must meet the legal requirements for all respective countries and be certified by local customs authorities.

Powerful, integrated customs platforms provide solutions for managing import and export procedures, as well as special procedures such as NCTs, inward/outward processing relief (IPR/OPR), bonded warehousing, port messages, or local clearance procedures in different countries. This kind of integrated platform delivers a number of benefits for both customs and it departments: centrally archiving declarations considerably improves transparency and traceability, e.g. for customs audits, and central data management enables cross-border data analysis. 

On the IT side, implementations, maintenance, updates, and support for platform solutions are much easier to manage compared to dealing with disjointed, individual solutions. Users benefit greatly, too, because one central platform reduces repeated data entries and enables national customs teams across the globe to support each other, and – if required – to set up a central competence centre.

Global trade and customs management are highly complex matters and integrated platform solutions make life much easier for internationally active companies. Legal certainty and compliance at all times, comprehensive transparency, and efficient and uniform processes are crucial in today’s globalised world and key to success in dynamic and competitive markets with constantly changing global trade regulations. Now is the right time for businesses to take a close look at their global trade systems and identify areas of improvement to future-proof their networks.