New Years is the perfect time to reflect on our past and prepare for our future. It’s a time to consider new beginnings, forget our losses and acknowledge new gains. It’s no longer just about losing weight or quitting bad habits, but furthermore how we can improve at work.

NORTH POLE, December 19, 2014 – North Pole Industries, a leading global provider of toys for good little girls and boys, has implemented Amber Road’s Global Trade Management suite for its worldwide distribution network.

Before signing with Amber Road, NPI had been using a combination of spreadsheets, wish lists, and a whole team of research elves to plan its supply chain.

We were excited to sponsor the Massachusetts Export Center's Annual Export Expo in Boston last week! The one-day event provides a forum for exporters to connect with the wide variety of export resources available in Massachusetts while learning about issues that impact their day-to-day export operations. The Expo’s workshops addressed current issues of concern to exporters, such as recent sanctions developments, export control trends, global intellectual property protection, and more.

The IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Global Trade Management 2014 Vendor Assessment is now available! This new research is an assessment of a vendor’s success in the global trade management (GTM) marketplace, including current and anticipated performance in the marketplace. The study assesses the capability and business strategy of five of the key global trade management vendors, including Amber Road, using a vendor assessment model called IDC MarketScape.

Earlier this month, Amber Road and Logistics Management broadcasted a webinar on The International vs. Domestic Supply Chain Performance gap: Uncovering the Investment Disparity. Our presenters, Scott Byrnes of Amber Road, and Bob Heaney of The Aberdeen Group, received several questions throughout the webinar, but did not have time to address them all during the live broadcast. Luckily, they have taken the time to answer all questions in a Q&A! Here's a preview:

What is the trend regarding leveraging contracted Broker/Forwarder expected service? For example, giving a broker access to EBS to pull country specific HS Codes directly.
The trend is to enable the brokers and forwarders to focus on what they do best (i.e., arrange for transportation and physically clear goods through Customs), and to automate the other functions (i.e., product classification and entry documentation preparation) themselves. Via automation, manufacturers are generating ‘broker packets’ which they send directly to the broker. These packets have almost all of the data, properly formatted, required for the broker to clear goods through customs – no chasing down classification numbers or shipping documents, no manually re-keying data from an importer security filing. As such, the brokers become much more efficient, and the importer is able to negotiate lower brokerage fees in lieu of the fact that the manufacturer is doing much of the up-front work, which is low margin business for the broker anyway. This collaboration between brokers, forwarders, manufacturers, retailers and distributors is all done via web-based portals.

China has watched its economy thrive in recent years with the sustained increase in apparel and footwear production factories and suppliers.  This shift has even affected China’s class structure that has led to a middle-class that can live in ways we have enjoyed for hundreds of years in other countries.  But the growth into a product superpower has come with heavy environmental costs for both China and the US. Those of us who travel frequently to this region in Asia have seen the impact on air quality alone.

After Russia’s first incursion into Ukraine back in February of 2014, the United States has imposed sanctions on a number of Russian financial, defense and energy-related entities. Measures include the denial and/or revocation of licenses subject to E.A.R. or ITAR jurisdiction, the placement of companies on the Entity List, the freezing of assets, financing restrictions on Russian banks and travel bans.