Oracle's Global Trade Management Product -5

Hi
Here's an update on Oracle's Global Trade Management product. The product will be released in the second half of the year. The date is still to be decided.

I will keep you posted if I hear more info on the date or the functionality that will be made available in this product.

Cheers

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Cheers

SAAS/ASP vs In House implementation

Every company that wants to implement a Trade Compliance application is trying to decide if it wants to implement an standalone version behind it's own firewall or use a software as a service
vendor or Application Service Provider vendor to host a solution outside it's firewall. I am sure this is even more relevant today with companies trying to be as cost conscious as possible. There is potentially a trade off between cost and risk. Here are some major areas to consider while making this decision:

1) How large are your volumes? If you are a medium/large company that has many millions of transactions a year it may make sense to look more closely at the in house solution. This is
because your fixed costs of hardware, software and support personnel will diminish as volumes
increase. I believe the sliding scale pricing model that ASP/SAAS vendors provide can prove to be more expensive than an in house implementation.

2) How many applications does your company run in house? If your company runs many applications then the support personnel you hire can be leveraged for your in house TC application. They will have experience in the physical architecture that your company prefers and assuming your TC application has a similar architecture they will be able to easily support it and keep it up to corporate standards.

3) How specialized are your requirements? If your TC requirements are very specialized it is possible the vendor will need to write a lot of custom code to support it. In this case it may make sense to take a closer look at an in house implementation. This will enable better control of the code and may also help in easy modification of it as there will be less reliance on vendor resources. Also if you are in a rapidly changing compliance requirement that requires you to change custom code it may make sense to have your implementation in house and have
a few dedicated in house resources rather than trying to bank on vendor resources.

4) How protective are you about your data? TC transaction data can have sensitive customer and pricing information. Regardless of the physical and electronic security your ASP/SAAS vendor may provide I think a corporate firewall and corporate physical security can be better monitored and remedied. Better safe than sorry!

5) Will my old data be readily available? Once the volume of transaction data becomes high some of the data may be archived to help improve with performance of the application. While working with an ASP/SAAS provider you must be comfortable that the data which will be archived will be readily available for viewing and reporting be it for an internal or external audit.

I hope this post gives you a good framework to make a decision between SAAS and in house implementations.

Cheers

Global Trade Compliance Priorities - An IT Analysis - Part 2

Continuing my analysis of the Aberdeen report:
Page 8 - 'Trade Compliance departments are beginning to behave more strategically, their increased responsibility driven by growing company operations and lack of understanding from other departments'
I hope Trade Compliance departments start including IT counterparts early on in strategy planning and implementation sessions. IT team members can help define strategy that reduces the total cost of ownership of applications and also spread the word around within IT and business groups so that Trade Compliance needs aren't ignored. I really do think Trade Compliance IT needs a spot at the strategy tables, otherwise companies will end up with a hodge podge of disparate systems that increase the total cost of ownership.

Page 11 -
46% of best in class companies have automated doc exchange with forwarders/3 PL's for export and/or import
58% of best in class perform automated restricted party screening for exports and 32% for imports
37% of best in class perform automated export license determination and management
58% of best in class have automated access to trade related content
26% of best in class have access to analytics tools for export/import transactions - reports, statistics, scenario analysis etc..

Best in class companies are the the top 20% of the companies. If they themselves have a limited level of automation then there seems to be a lot of potential for automation in the future. I hope this means a lot of opportunity for fellow Trade Compliance IT professionals.

(to be continued)

Global Trade IT Strategy anyone?

Hi

The article in supply chain digest titled "Global Logistics News: Technology Enablement in Global Logistics and Trade Management Remains Well Behind Growth in Global Sourcing" touched a raw nerve:

http://www.scdigest.com/assets/On_Target/08-08-20-1.php?cid=1865

The article talks about how IT initiative in Global Trade are reactionary. I entirely agree. I would be surprised if the approach changes. Why? Here are some reasons:

a) IT is considered as a cost center and isn't considered a strategic partner. Trade Compliance/Global Trade IT gets lumped into the same bucket. Often operations/business folks want to control IT strategy. I think it needs to be a partnership.

b) There aren't enough Global Trade/Trade Compliance IT professionals around to provide the right kind of vision and direction. Global Trade IT is a relatively new area. The number of professionals with the right knowledge and skills to work on a roadmap is limited. Even if they have the vision they may be constrained by my comment in a).

Let's hope company's start taking Global Trade IT initiatives more seriously and start getting the right IT people together to work on roadmaps.

Cheers

Added some of my favorite links

Hi

I wanted to add something to my blog which would tickle your brain. I have added some of my favorite sites for reading up on Trade Compliance. Which ones are yours?