There are about ten policy changes every day. Our world moves quickly, and between economic wars and military sanctions, the rules are constantly changing.

On top of all the changes, trade policies are constructed of legal text difficult for import and export coordinators to understand and translate into trade and customs SOPs. Trade and Customs teams spend an average of 400 hours every year screening trade policies.

In those conditions, hardware companies have difficulties with imports and exports. The smallest ones, the SMEs, sacrifice international trade or face unexpected costs and penalties at customs. The biggest ones, the enterprises, try to master this field but end up making errors leading to costly penalties, such as Detention and Demurrage. They need a resilient solution to ensure they stay on track, compliant no matter what changes, and have access to other markets.

Current Challenges for Hardware Companies

The supply chain is always in flux. And with a fluctuating supply chain, you can expect that compliance regulations will have to adapt to the evolving supply chain.

The challenges of cross-border international trade according to KPMG include:

Keeping up with regulatory changes
Understanding the regulations
Executing paperwork
Facing tax and customs with unexpected fees
Lack of skilled resources

Especially with the pandemic, keeping up with the various regulatory changes was the primary challenge for companies, as anticipated. Global events propel regulation changes, and the industry has seen its fair share of regulatory changes over the last few years.

It’s no secret that we’re making our way into the new normal. And it’s likely no surprise that with a new normal, there are new rules.

Companies need to prepare documents, including invoices, certificates of origin, letters of credit, packing lists, bills of landing, and more. In some cases, the documents need to be certified. The number of records, their names, and the terms of the certification organisations differs and can change, making it difficult to know what’s needed and how to execute everything correctly with outdated and unfriendly software.

The difficulty of accurate execution leads to errors. Logistics and supply chain professionals guarantee there are no errors before shipping. They ensure control through numerous time-consuming emails with colleagues in other manufacturing plants, sales representatives, or external stakeholders.

Even professionals who possess the maximum knowledge accumulated and take care when preparing documents are still stressed about what can happen at customs. Incomplete or missing documents can lead to a blocked shipment, which results in one of three scenarios:

The package is shipped back to the shipper, costing the company time and money
The item(s) is destroyed, and the shipper has to re-manufacture it and send it again, again costing time and money
The package is blocked until the situation is resolved through a lengthy process that requires an expert and paying harbour and airport invoice fees and penalties known as Detention and Demurrage costs, once again costing time and money

Sometimes businesses never find out what happens at customs or while shipments are on the ground. There are tacit rules and scenarios that could throw a shipment off course—subparts from a third country aren’t accepted, a grumpy customs officer, etc.

You need to feel confident that your shipments will get to their intended destinations on time and intact.

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The Consequences of the Current System

The challenges facing the hardware supply chain have led to some significant consequences. Instead of a seamless shipment procedure, manufacturers are stuck with a long and inefficient process of manual research and execution. On top of that, poor IT support to assist in streamlining the process leads to unmotivated employees and poor employee retention.

As discussed in the last section, these inefficiencies cause errors that waste time, cost money, and block shipments during customs processes. Nearly three-quarters of companies lost up to €1 million due to customs alone, and 81% of micro-industries in the EU incurred unexpected losses due to customs.

On top of everything else, companies are left with no visibility, traceability, or accountability in their supply chain.

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Holocene for Hardware Companies

Holocene offers hardware companies stability and predictability in their cross-border supply chain. Holocene’s organisation is composed of elite engineers with various supply chain, logistics, and tech backgrounds. Holocene is supported with global trade experts’ insights from all over the world.

We make it our mission to understand the various nuances of compliance regulations, so we can make your teams’ lives easier. Let’s explore Holocene’s key features.

Knowledge of Updated Trade Policies

Thanks to its network of partners and customers, plus its cloud and AI technology capabilities, Holocene offers access to an updated Common Knowledge Base of Trade Policies. There’s no need to track regulations manually, no need for on-site experts, and no need for legal knowledge.

Transformation of Scattered Trade and Customs Data into Actionable Business Rules

With its robust cloud and AI technologies, Holocene transforms users’ and external sources’ scattered Trade and Customs data into actionable business rules that machines understand. The scattered data can be in various formats, such as documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, and more. Users don’t have to worry about creating SOPs; the data is already actionable with Holocene.

Knowledge of Documents Preparation for Trade Lane

Since Holocene’s actionable business rules are understandable by machines through its powerful cloud and AI technology, our system can assist in documents preparation for each Trade Lane and product type. Holocene allows the users to consult this knowledge as needed.

The Capability of Documents Analysis

Holocene enables hardware companies to automatically check shipment documents pre-, intra-, and post-shipping against the understandable business rules. The system reviews each document against trade policies and compares it to similar documents to ensure homogeneity of the bundle. This check identifies errors and provides predictive recommendations to help users solve the issue.

Knowledge of Tacit Trade Policies

Holocene uses its cloud and AI technology to identify tacit Trade Policy rules to execute at customs even when the responsible governing body hasn’t written them out in an official, consolidated format. Holocene lets users incorporate the observed unspoken rules with the general and user-specific rules to be transformed into understandable business rules.

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The Benefits of Holocene for Hardware Companies

Employing Holocene Software-as-a-Service saves hardware companies time and money by sparing them from spending hours and days following trade policies. Additionally, with an incredibly robust AI to monitor trade policies, hardware companies have access to a centralised knowledge base that makes it easier to bring new employees up to speed.

By optimising, automating, and digitising document preparation, hardware companies are able to accelerate processing time, so team members can focus on more critical tasks. Since employees aren’t wasting their time with tedious busywork anymore, they’ll be more engaged with their jobs, and the company will experience an increase in employee retention while the world is suffering from the Great Resignation since months.

Increasing document preparation accuracy with AI-powered automatic checks empowers users to feel confident knowing that their documents are error-free. Hardware companies can say goodbye to time- and money-wasting consequences because they can trust that Holocene has their back.

Simply having better visibility and resilience will help enterprises avoid the black swans and grey rhinos events and gives users complete control to mitigate the risks of any upcoming crises.

See how Holocene can transform your hardware company’s cross-border supply chain. Contact us today , so we can start alleviating your pain points.