BY BEN AMES, SENIOR EDITOR
GLOBAL TRADE MANAGEMENT
Technology
WHEN AN AMERICAN CONSUMER BUYS A PAIR OF
running shoes as a holiday gift, the simple act of clicking
a few boxes on an e-commerce site sets in motion a flurry of actions around the globe.
The order may cascade from a retail Web portal in the
U.S. to a fulfillment center, carrier, freight forwarder,
and customs broker scattered across various countries,
each with its own language, currency, tariffs, and import/
export laws and regulations. Coordinating this type of
multileg shipment and staying in compliance with the
various rules and regulations may sound like a headache
and a half, but it’s not the nightmare it once was. Today’s
shippers have a tool that helps make sense of the process:
global trade management (GTM) software.
In a nutshell, GTM software is a tool that businesses
use to manage their import and export transactions and
to track the complex and ever-changing symphony of
details that—incredibly—result in the delivery of a pair
of athletic shoes in the right size, color, and style to the
buyer’s doorstep.
If that seems like a challenge, it is. To lace all those
pieces together, GTM vendors must track dozens of
bits of data for every purchase, combining information
in many formats and languages and delivering the data
just in time for each logistics partner to run the next
leg in the relay. But before they can do this, they must
first create a single, consistent database of international
trade details from a huge variety of laws in a variety of
languages.
KEEPING UP WITH CONSTANT CHANGE
The stakes are high—global trade demands rapid hand-
Cutting through language barriers is part of the picture. But there’s a whole lot
more global trade management software can do for you and your company.
Speaking the
language of trade
