Integrating shipping and export management processes on a single platform is the first step to building an efficient global trade management system. In this QAD Precision Report, we discuss the benefits of this strategy.
As cross-border commerce grows, facilitating export management is becoming a more urgent business problem for organizations that ship internationally.
To handle this explosive growth, organizations must streamline processes and minimize manual labor, while ensuring compliance with global trade rules. Integrating shipping and export management-related business processes, on a single multi carrier shipping and global trade management platform, is the first step to building a more efficient global trade execution system.
How prepared is your organization? If you’re not sure, here are some questions worth pondering:
- When your organization ships internationally, how many different applications and systems does it take to send each order?
- How much time do your people spend toggling between applications to complete both shipping documentation and export compliance paperwork?
- How much of the work does your staff do by hand due to gaps in each system?
If your organization is using multiple systems combined with manual processes to handle shipping and export management for international trade, your solution is making it harder—not easier—to get your goods where they need to go. That’s why we believe using a single end-to-end solution for shipping and global trade management is a superior strategy over multiple solutions.
Separate Systems Waste Time and Money
Many organizations that ship internationally use some form of global trade management software. They do this to streamline the documentation and compliance requirements associated with shipping packages overseas. Often these solutions are not integrated with multi carrier shipping. This leaves organizations unable to gather insight into how shipping and export management each impact their operations.
It’s also common for organizations to use a carrier-provided shipping solution. When they do so, they send all shipments via a single preferred carrier. This limits organizations to the pricing and service delivery options available from that carrier. They are unable to compare rates, routes, and performance to reduce costs and improve delivery times.
When you handle shipping and export management separately you gain few of the benefits of each solution. These include streamlining documentation and comparing rates and routes. You must manage many processes by hand, toggling between systems. This costs time and creates risk of errors and omissions.
If servicing international markets is critical to your business, so too is the efficient management of these processes with an end-to-end solution. After all, the recipient information is—or should be—the same information that is passed through denied party screening. Why re-key this data to several disparate systems when capturing the data once is more efficient and accurate?
With an integrated solution, organizations can get the best of both worlds. This is an end-to-end solution that delivers maximum control over shipping costs and performance, along with streamlined global trade documentation and reduced risk of border delays, compliance violations, and more.
The Benefits of Export Management and Shipping
Shipping to different parts of the world is already challenging enough, without having to navigate the complexity of using multiple systems to do it. Here are four reasons why a single, end-to-end solution for shipping and export management is superior to using multiple applications.
TIME IS MONEY
The old saw that time is money is nowhere more true than when it comes to foreign trade and shipping. When you use multiple solutions you’re slowing down the process. Shipping needs to be fast and efficient in order to be profitable and maintain high customer satisfaction.
REDUCE COMPLEXITY AND RISK
The more complex your systems the more likely it is to miss a step. This could lead to inaccurate or incomplete shipping or poor export controls. The result? Lost packages, delays, border stoppages or even fines. With an integrated system, all compliance stepsand all documentation requirements are met.
LEVERAGE YOUR DATA WORK FOR BETTER DECISION-MAKING
With a single solution for export management and shipping, your data is not siloed. As a result, you have a clearer picture of your operations, which leads to data-driven decisions.
Integrating multiple systems is expensive, which is why many organizations don’t do this. Alternatively, when they do integrate, they do so at as few “touchpoints” as possible to streamline the systems, while minimizing integration costs. With this approach, more granular data that could provide deeper insight into how export trading, trade compliance and shipping operations affect one another simply isn’t available.
Integration between multiple systems is also challenging due to the fact that each solution might use a different field name for the same data. Worse yet, each system may measure the same data differently. When this is the case, integrating the two solutions is challenging, if not impossible, leading to problems with data consistency.
IMPROVE LOGISTICS STRATEGY
Once upon a time, logistics was seen as more of a support function that fulfilled a critical support role (getting products where they needed to go). Logistics and shipping were not seen as having strategic importance, but that has changed.
As global trade becomes a larger percentage of your total revenue, you will need to arm your logistics managers with new tools. With an integrated solution, logistics managers can provide strategic insight into everything from export compliance, documentation requirements, shipping costs, routing, delivery performance, and more.
Integrated Export Management and Transportation Execution
If you ship products to one or multiple international locations, integrating export management, documentation production and shipping execution simplifies the export process. With QAD Precision, all major functions (shipping, trade documentation, and compliance) are done through the same solution, and built using the same software.
QAD Precision promotes on-time delivery while mitigating compliance risk. At the export processes, the solution vets the transaction, and alerts you to critical export shipping and/or regulatory controls, including export screening and license determination.
QAD Precision automates documentation production and customs reporting. Shippers therefore have all the documentation required to complete a shipment, prepared correctly and presented in the correct format and language. This includes carrier compliant labelling as well as export and transportation documentation.
Due to QAD Precision’s integrated system architecture, the vast majority — 95 percent — of the data needed for each export transaction is automatically provided. This dramatically increases productivity, reduces human error and streamlines the shipping process.
Integrating shipping and export management offers numerous benefits, such as improved efficiency, cost savings, enhanced visibility, and streamlined processes.