GT Nexus, Integration Point could nudge trade compliance into the forefront

The two companies announced a joint network for managing international logistics, finance and trade compliance, highlighting the growing importance of strategic customs and duty automation.    American Shipper has been writing for years – literally, years – about how the intersection of logistics and trade compliance is relatively unexplored territory.
   That is, those two parallel activities have largely been confined to separate process streams. Separate teams, separate systems, separate decision-making.
   Part of the reason is very few solutions providers had all the makings of a truly integrated offering under one hood: procurement, in-transit visibility, customs filings, duty minimization strategies and finance.
   That’s certainly changed more recently. There are a handful or more of companies that can do all this through the same solution, but another approach is simply to go big on a partnership, to tether together two heavyweight solutions that are complementary to attempt to make them more the sum of their parts.
   The news this week that GT Nexus and Integration Point have partnered in such a way makes perfect sense. GT Nexus, with Infor behind it, is seeking to become the most prominent freight-oriented commerce platform in the world. Its system ties together ocean and air visibility, procurement and execution capabilities with supplier management and trade finance tools. What GT Nexus has never had native in its platform is trade compliance and strategic duty savings tools, like FTA and FTZ programs.
   Behind the scenes, GT Nexus has been working closely for a couple years with Integration Point, a major provider of such tools, to offer a more complete suite to importers and exporters. The announcement this week isn’t a new development as much as it is an acknowledgment that the power of the two brands with a unified offering are more than the sum of the parts.
   “Trade compliance becomes more strategic when you connect it directly to your supply chain processes,” said Kurt Cavano, president of the Infor GT Nexus Commerce Network. “Companies often experience cargo delays due to inefficient systems and processes, or overpay in duties because they’re not set up to take advantage of programs or systems that can reduce their net fees.”
   And therein lies the efficiency of combining these functions in a more systemic way. Opportunities are lost and potential roadblocks unheeded when companies tackle logistics and trade compliance in parallel, rather than in a single stream.
   This partnership is at the heart of what makes modern Global Trade Management (GTM) so compelling. GTM historically has been synonymous with trade compliance, but it can and should be much more than that. As the mantra goes, optimizing in one area doesn’t necessarily mean the business as a whole is optimized.
   While GT Nexus has rightly focused on digitizing core functional areas that have long bedeviled shippers and 3PLs, like visibility and procurement, it is also right in now trumpeting how big a deal the trade compliance and duty strategy pieces are as well.
   To be sure, other software companies in the GTM space (Integration Point among them) have been emphasizing the importance of trade compliance automation in a modern context.
   We’ve written before how the GTM industry as a whole seems underappreciated by the market, and is maybe due for a period of consolidation to provide it some scale it might be missing.