Talk about a Cuban Export Crisis….CWT B.V., a Dutch travel agency, has been fined $5.9M by the U.S. government for violating the trade embargo to Cuba. CWT’s violations took place from August 8, 2006 to November 28, 2012 and involved trips to Cuba by 44,430 people.

But why, you might ask, is a Dutch company getting fined by the U.S. government? In 2006, CWT became majority-owned by U.S. entities and thus subject to the U.S. Trading With the Enemy Act. CWT continued doing business with Cuba, but without obtaining the necessary licenses issued by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

In the quest to maintain a profitable global supply chain, technology is just as important as human know-how. Recently, Ty Bordner, Vice President of Product Management and Solutions Consulting at Amber Road, talked to Inbound Logistics about the benefits that GTM software can offer companies today.

Amber Road is now a publicly traded company! It listed as AMBR on the New York Stock Exchange on March 21, 2014. The video below captures the excitement of the company's initial public offering from the floor of the NYSE to its offices around the globe.

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.

Globally efficient trade management is mission critical. Please join Amber Road in London on 23-25 June for Global Trade Management Europe 2014. Not your typical compliance conference, this is the first regional forum to tackle GTM at a holistic level to help you deliver efficient, compliant and profitable global trade.

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

Amber Road would like to thank all of those who attended American Shipper’s Bridging the Gap Between Existing Compliance Automation and True GTM Platforms 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:

Join Sandler & Travis Trade Advisory Services, Inc. and Amber Road for a free webinar on Thursday, April 17 at 11am EDT.

With Miami’s beautiful beaches and year-round warm weather, it’s hard to have many worries – unless you are facing deemed export risks. With increasing local, state and federal regulations, the University of Miami (UM) realized its current export compliance processes were reactive and could not effectively manage risks. UM needed a way to improve its export compliance program.

To achieve its goals, UM implemented the restricted party screening module of Amber Road’s Export On-Demand solution. They also use Amber Road to streamline and manage their export license requirements, as well as address challenges in identifying export control classification numbers (ECN) and harmonized tariff schedule (HTS) numbers.

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.

According to a 2013 Aberdeen Group study of Chief Supply Chain Officers, the top business pressures facing the industry are the impacts from increasing supply chain complexity (i.e., longer lead times and lead-time variability, or increasing numbers of suppliers, partners, carriers, customers, countries, and logistics channels), as well as rising supply chain management costs.