Global trade and the associated supply chain are subject to ever-increasing international regulations and legislation. Global Trade Management reduces the risk of liability, fines and delays at international borders, and conducting a sourcing and distribution analysis presents possibilities for companies to minimize import duties, taxes and surcharges.

Last week in Geneva, a deal was struck between Iran and six world powers, including the U.S. and the European Union, to relax global trade restrictions on cars, petrochemicals, aviation parts, gold, and insurance for oil cargoes. Additionally, Iran will be permitted to continue exporting oil at current levels instead of forcing further reductions.

American Shipper’s Global Transportation Management Benchmark Study: Climbing the Visibility Sophistication Ladder, found that successful shippers and their service partners are investing in supply chain visibility to deal with their growing and complex supply chains. In fact, 66% of shippers and 75% of forwarders were able to quantify an ROI from their visibility investment!

The idea of industry segmentation argues that companies need to execute separate strategies for commodities and newer, innovative goods – the demand structures certainly differ. Supply chain segmentation is no different, and SCM World delves into this critical, but underutilized, business process in their brand new report, “Supply Chain Segmentation: The Key to Future Profitability.”

U.S. authorities seized more than 200,000 toy dolls from China at several ports of entry this year due to high concentrations of phthalates, a group of banned chemical compounds considered dangerous to children.

Amber Road would like to thank all of those who attended American Shipper’s “A Place at the Table - Bringing the Export Team into Strategic Discussions” webinar. The attendees asked some great questions, but unfortunately, we ran out of time and were unable to answer all of them. The presenters were kind enough to provide us with written responses to those questions. Here are a few:

As federal defense contracts continue to be cut, the state of Virginia has launched a $2 million campaign called “Going Global” to help its numerous defense-related contractors capture international export opportunities.

As you are well aware, China has its own set of complex trade regulations. Companies are turning to China Trade Management (CTM) software solutions to help them take advantage of the Processing Trade program. With the possibility of reducing product cost by 25% or more, they can’t afford not to!

Supply chains are by their very nature connected, information-dependent, and undergoing constant change. Most senior supply chain leaders have become accustomed to developing and deploying operational strategies on the back of software applications that are generally legacy systems underpinning specialty bolt-on tools. The result is sometimes clunky and rarely flexible in the face of changing business conditions. In “Supply Chain and the Future of Applications” SCM World reports on how the idea of “cloud” based software promises to change this.

Surprisingly, while overall international freight forwarding grew by 3.2% to $63.2 billion in 2012, ocean freight saw large growth (11.5%) while air freight experienced significant decline (4.2%). This disparity can largely be attributed to companies increasing visibility into their supply chain and no longer needing to rely on air transport, which was traditionally the more reliable yet costly method.