A trade visibility solution is a key component of a supply chain visibility platform that allows a company to track its products from the time they leave a supplier's warehouse until the time they reach the end customer. Trade visibility is important for a number of reasons as it helps you:

• understand the factors that impact costs, cycle times, and service levels,
• identify minor issues before they turn into major problems,
• enforce compliance, and, most importantly,
• prevent millions of dollars from being flushed down the drain.

An average multi-national needlessly spends millions upon millions of dollars a year that it doesn't have to as part of it's global sourcing operation. Millions that could be saved if the company implemented a good end-to-end trade visibility solution.

How much can you save? It depends on how much you are spending, and how bad your processes are, but consider the following:

• A Global Data Mining study across 5 companies with between 3 Billion and 31 Billion in revenue found over 150 Million in potential duty savings alone just through better classification.
• Prior to using the Integration Point Denied Trade Screening Solution, Eastern employees used to spend 15 to 25 minutes per shipment in a costly error-prone manual process. Now they can screen shipments in under a minute.
• Most companies spend hundreds of dollars in manual filing costs per shipment which can be processed for pennies by global trade management solutions.

And that's just the tip of the ice-berg. Non-compliance costs can add up even faster!

For a full, in-depth discussion of Why You Need Trade Visibility, download the latest Sourcing Innovation Illumination, sponsored by Integration Point.