17 Jul Global Trade Management Software Companies: What to Look For
International trade involves unique business process challenges that can be costly if left unaddressed. Long-term trade success requires effective management of such risks. That starts with a global trade software solution for process management—one that’s perfectly suited to your organization.
The right global trade solution for your company’s trade requirements will include a couple of must-haves: It must allow you to streamline and automate business processes where possible to fully realize a reduction of risk by minimizing mistakes and errors. It must also maintain and provide consistent, accurate, and up-to-date data so that your operations stay on track. Beyond those core functions, getting the right global trade management software depends on understanding your goals for the solution, and on getting the right company to do the job.
Understanding What Global Trade Management Software Will Accomplish
It is imperative to begin your software search in possession of a solid understanding of what you will need it to accomplish. Are you starting from the ground level with a new system, or looking to add functionalities to your current global trade solution? Do you need a complete overhaul of business processes to catapult you past competitors? Knowing where you are coming from and where you need to be is a great start to the software selection process.
Assessing your global trade requirements starts with a high-level analysis of all areas of your current operations. Focusing on the identification of manual processes first presents a clearer picture of which can be targeted for automation and which are obsolete, and may therefore be removed from process flows. As you examine your processes, you will discover where functionalities can be improved or added to process flows. This gives you valuable information for matching your processes to corresponding regulatory requirements and trade goals—and to an inclusive software solution to keep operations steaming along.
The key is knowing where to look when overseeing your business process discovery phase. Often businesses will miss a small segment of operations, causing implementation delays or rework down the road. The best global trade management software companies will act as IT-software partners, as global trade and compliance experts, and apply expertise in your industry to ensuring those types of oversights don’t happen. They can leverage vast amounts of knowledge and experience to direct your eyes exactly at what needs to be examined, saving you time and reducing implementation risks.
Pairing Business Requirements to Innovative Global Trade Software
When evaluating any global trade software solution, weighing its potential functionality against your business processes and regulatory requirements is crucial to making the right choice. As you shop around, you will find that most of the products on the market are great in some aspects but fall short in others. It’s tempting to implement a handful of global trade software solutions to cobble together what you need, but this approach comes with some serious drawbacks. Issues due to incompatible data formats, lack of inter-communication,, misaligned support contracts, and non-contiguous process monitoring will leave you more vulnerable to risk.
Your global trade solution must be a flexible, one-stop shop for all of your process management demands. SAP GTS provides you with a comprehensive solution to meet most needs. The scalable nature of SAP GTS allows you to implement as many or as few of its functionalities as needed, confident in knowing that you can seamlessly integrate more as needed.
Taking Advantage of What SAP GTS Offers Global Businesses
SAP GTS helps your global operations with automated SPL and embargo list screenings that achieve high levels of error reductions, lower operational risks and eliminate surprises in your marketplace. The software’s high-volume document management further reduces risk through precise automations, making remediations easy. This results in highly successful audits and a fast ROI, especially when you recruit an expert implementer of SAP GTS.
The right IT partner will have not just technical expertise, but highly-capable GTCCs to ensure alignment with your trade operations. They secure your global trade processes by aligning them with documentation and screening requirements, while optimizing trade operations for the highest levels of risk reduction. They also help identify trade opportunities that may be a fit while helping the implementation team to ready processes for trade.
Ask prospective IT partners about what happens after your system is first configured: What about post engagement support? Do they provide in-depth knowledge transfer to your staff, so that the people using the system understand what has been done and why? Will they provide the training your staff needs to effectively use the new GTS solution? The right partner will have answers based on experience, and will help ensure your global trade success, both during and after IT deployment.