A. General Information
Total Trade Platform
B. Lessons Learned
In line with CrimsonLogic’s vision is to be the world’s leading Total Trade service provider, its “Total Trade Platform” harnesses its expertise in trade facilitation and digital technologies to enable governments and businesses to orchestrate the global movement of goods, making international trade more competitive, resilient and sustainable.
Navigating the supply chain ecosystem can be a daunting task as efficiency gains is inhibited by the lack of data standardisation and flow, disparate systems, regulatory constraints, and associated financial risk. Apart from authenticity of the documentation, supply chain processes can be manual and document intensive. With disparate data sources, data sharing and collaboration across the supply chain is becoming disconnected and fragmented.
CrimsonLogic’s Total Trade Platform bridges digital silos and physical chasms that now exist in the import and export value chain, making it easier for governments and businesses to collaborate. It bridges digital silos by connecting disparate systems through managing, exchanging and transforming trade data. Gaps between the digital and physical are bridged through real-time visibility and tracking of goods movement through the different stages of international shipping. The Platform comprises two suites of interoperable modules, one being government-centric and the other, business-centric.
Our product suite spans both government centric and business applications, for trade facilitation, regulatory enforcement and supervision. The government centric platform - TFP (Trade Facilitation Platform) covers Single Window, Customs Management, Free Trade Zone Management, Permits & Licenses, Advanced Risk Analytics, Trade Advisory, Trade Visualisation, Cross Border, e-Martime Single Window; Our business centric platform is called CALISTA. CALISTA is a global supply chain orchestration platform, that provides applications to address the 3 main flows in cross-border trade: Logistics (I.e. moving cargo from point A to B) Compliance (involving trade advisory, customs clearance and post clearance support) Finance: Providing the business community access to trade finance, low cost cross border payments and insurance products The Government centric solutions may be hosted on premises or on the cloud and the Business centric services are primarily offered as a SaaS.
Primarily all data from shipment documents such as packing list, invoice, B/L, booking confirmation, etc. are typically exchanged. Our platform/services support both the exchange of structured (data in XML, JSON, CSV, EDI, etc.) as well as unstructured data (e.g. PDF).
For storing the data relational databases as well as object stores are used. For unstructured data Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques are used to extract information to our proprietary ontologies for processing.
The harmonisation of data across different countries, regimes, regulatory submission types posed a great challenge. We have implemented some forms of harmonisation e.g. at Manifest or Declaration levels, and developed a hybrid approach to organise and categorise data in a intermediate step prior to applying validation/business rules and generating the outputs for dowstream systems or processes.
Trade data / requirements for each country can be rather different and complex depending on the in-country Customs requirements. Attempting to harmonise into a global repository is rather unachievable. Different techniques to group/categories based on regimes or regions are more achievable.
Benefit for governments: It provides a high degree of control. With visibility of the end-to-end movement and clearance of goods across borders, the platform ensures compliance to trade regulations. Benefits to businesses: Businesses experience reduction in submission errors and faster customs clearance. With improved control and connectivity, productivity and efficiency are increased. Businesses become more profitable, while the country becomes more attractive to investors, giving it a competitive edge in the global economy.
All are built in-house.
For TFP or CALISTA project implementation, we typically provide knowledge transfer for customers to be able to self-support as well as perform their own configuration on our products. Moving forward, we plan to expand coverage to more countries and rolling out services targetting more customer segments.
[Success story] A shipping and logistics provider based in Saudi Arabia finds peace of mind in meeting Customs requirements. Challenge: Being up to date with and interpreting Customs requirements correctly required significant time and effort, as a misinterpretation would result in rejection of the declaration, which could delay the clearing of physical cargo. Solution: They needed an intuitive solution for Customs declarations. Results: With the CALISTA regulatory filing service, they were able to have more assurance for successful declarations, increased compliance as well as substantial time and costs savings.
C. Relevant Standards
API, and file based transfer for certain legacy process.