by Kae-Por Chang, Managing Director, Amber Road China

The total costs to conduct business and supply chain operations in China for multi-national companies are greatly influenced by a company’s capabilities to manage its General Trade, Processing Trade, and Bonded Zone operations in China.

Processing Trade, for example, affects companies that import materials and components into China and use those materials and components to manufacture finished goods for export to foreign markets. When properly administered, Processing Trade transactions are exempt from import duties and value-added-taxes on export. Utilizing the Processing Trade program can reduce product costs and increase working capital efficiency by 25 percent or more.

The shipping industry has finally started to go digital. Until recently, if you wanted to ship a container from San Francisco to Hong Kong, you had to place an order over the phone. with a person on the receiving side. However, those people taking the ordersmake an error 20% of the time, which costs the shipping industry about $684 million a year, according to Ocean Audit, Inc. 

To cut down on shipping entry errors, many companies have turned to digital platforms offered by software firms like Amber Road, or carriers like A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S.

Congratulations are in order for Amber Road's Chief Financial Officer Thomas Conway, who won the New Jersey Technology Council's CFO Deal of the Year Award today!

Tom Conway celebrates above with Amber Road CTO Glenn Gorman,CEO Jim Preuninger, VP Sales Al Cooke, his wife Meagan Conway, and Greg Olear. The announcement was made at the NJTC CFO Awards Breakfast this morning.

Last month, American Shipper and Amber Road hosted a very popular webinar on FTZs titled "The Free Trade Zone Boom: Using Automation to Power FTZ-Driven Savings." You can catch a recording of that webinar on our Resource Library here.

Our speakers, Trey Boring of IMS Worldwide, Inc., and Matt Robeson of Amber Road, received over 50 great questions during the webinar, and since they were unable to answer them all during the webcast, we have posted their answers online. Here are a few highlights!

We are very excited to announce that CEO Jim Preuninger is a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2014 Award for the New Jersey region!

The awards program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities.  Jim Preuninger was selected as a finalist by a panel of independent judges.  Award winners will be announced at a special gala event on Thursday, June 26th at the Hyatt Regency New Brunswick.  

Foreign Trade Zones (FTZs) can help global shippers maximize savings and minimize operational costs. Speeding customs clearance and eliminating paperwork seals the deal.

According to this great Inbound Logistics report, FTZ’s were created in 1938 and have grown in importance ever since, as goods are increasingly made, assembled and sold in different countries. Domestic and foreign commercial merchandise that goes through an FTZ receives the same customs treatment it would if it were outside the commerce of the United States.

That means importers, distributors, manufacturers, and other shippers can use FTZ’s to defer, eliminate, or reduce significant duties on imported goods.

Want to learn more? Join Amber Road and American Shipper for a webinar on The Free Trade Zone Boom: Using Automation to Power FTZ-Driven Duty Savings tomorrow, May 14, at 2 PM EDT.

We’re sure it happens all the time: your company receives a product order, but you can’t decide whether to send it to the account address or the shipping address. However, if those two addresses are in Iran and Dubai, and your product could potentially be used in nuclear programs, you may want to double-check where your shipment is headed – or you could get slapped with a $90,000 fine.

That’s what happened to Lee Specialties, a Canadian manufacturer of oil field equipment, when they shipped rubber circles known as Viton o-rings to Iran in January 2012.

Global trade has an even farther reach than you may realize. For example, did you know...

Successful global supply chains require timely access to complete and accurate global trade content. Content isn't just data, though -  content combines logic with data, automating rules with data to keep companies in compliance.

For example, calculating the landed cost of a good requires not only knowledge of the harmonized tariff schedule (HTS),  the duties and fees – among other pieces of information-- associated with the item, but also the applying algorithms (the logic) to the information to calculate that cost. Similarly, simply knowing an Export Classification Number won’t tell you whether you need a license to ship an item.