Global Trade Management Solutions
International trade is a hugely complex system, with importers and exporters having to balance a wide range of compliance and security requirements, customs duties, trade restrictions and other regulations.
For large businesses, this can quickly become unmanageable. Therefore, in order to bring this back under control, the use of dedicated Global Trade Management (GTM) solutions is a must.
What are Global Trade Management solutions?
GTM solutions are intended to bring all the tools you need to effectively manage your entire international trade operations into a single location. They aim to streamline the entire trade lifecycle, from initial sales orders through to shipping and logistics, as well as customs filings and other essential compliance activities.
These tools need to integrate with and work seamlessly alongside other critical business systems, including enterprise resource planning tools, purchasing software, supply chain suites and those of partner companies. By doing this, firms not only ensure they are compliant with complex and varying regulations around the world, but save time and money and boost their overall competitiveness.
The advantages of an effective Global Trade Management solution
A good GTM Solution should allow businesses to greatly increase their efficiency. Automation technologies for areas such as managing trade documents, filing declarations to the relevant authorities in each country, and ensuring compliance with regulations not only make these processes much faster, but enable greater accuracy, reduce the risk of costly errors and delivers better results.
This has a number of advantages. As well as freeing up time for your team, it provides a much higher level of visibility into everything that is going on within their logistics supply chain, enabling traceability and auditability of any goods.
What's included in a strong Global Trade Management tool?
Effective Global Trade Management tools should encompass a range of features to help give you full visibility and compliance over all aspects of your operations. Some of the most important include:
Customs filing
Customs filing tools automate and streamline the process of filing customs declarations across multiple countries and connect directly with government systems to make these essential processes easier and more accurate. This greatly reduces the risk of miscalculations that could result in you failing to declare items or not paying the correct excise duties or other tariffs.
Classifications
Understanding the correct classification for each product is vital in ensuring the smooth import and export of items around the world. This can be a highly complex process, especially for items with many components, so being able to resolve any classification questions accurately makes life much simpler, especially when dealing with multiple countries that may have their own unique systems.
Origin calculations
Determining whether goods may be liable for quotas, extra tariffs or preferential treatment under rules of origin can be another highly complex process, especially for items with many component parts. Being able to calculate this quickly and efficiently ensures businesses are able to take full advantage of arrangements such as free trade agreements and ensure they are paying the correct amounts of tax.
Export controls
Ensuring you're complying with any restrictions and export controls is another critical aspect of a good Global Trade Management system. This may cover everything from the export of sensitive technologies or dual-use items to ensuring you're not doing business with sanctioned individuals, companies or countries.
Data analytics
There's more to an effective solution than compliance, however. Advanced data analytics are also a must for importers and exporters. This can provide critical insight into patterns, emerging trends, opportunities and potential problems in your supply chain, helping you learn and adapt faster. Having this available on-demand, in an easy-to-understand, visual format is therefore an essential help.
These are just some of the capabilities of a comprehensive Global Trade Management solution. With the right tools, you can do much more to manage and take control over your entire trade lifecycle in a single location.
FAQ
Yes. Sanctions and denied party screening are delivered through MIC's Export Control Management (ECM) module with MIC DPS, designed to catch compliance risks before a transaction happens. Business partners (customers, suppliers, service providers, and employees, including their addresses) are screened against numerous restricted party lists, covering e.g. the major US (OFAC, BIS), EU, UN, and UK lists. The underlying content is maintained by MIC and updated daily, so you always screen against current data. Key capabilities include:
- Real-time, manual, batch, and automated delta screening, which re-checks only what has changed
- Configurable matching and thresholds that handle name variations and reduce false positives
- Screening is embedded directly into business processes, automatically raising an alert or blocking a transaction when a potential match is identified
- Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) screening for over 20 million companies worldwide
- Real-time integration with MIC-CUST®, so screening runs automatically when export declarations are filed and results are linked directly to the customs declaration workflow
Duty reduction is driven by MIC's Origin Calculation System (OCS), which automates preferential origin determination for manufactured goods based on bills of materials, so you can claim free trade agreement (FTA) benefits. MIC OCS calculates preferential origin across 250+ FTAs (including USMCA, EU-UK (TCA), CETA, and EU-Japan, EU-Mercosur and provides What-If simulations to assess the impact of sourcing changes.
Highlights include:
- A supplier portal that collects and validates long-term and per-order supplier declarations, with automated reminders
- What-if simulations that compare duty savings before you change sourcing
- Automatic duty, tax, and VAT calculation in MIC-CUST® Import
- Built-in duty savings analytics to monitor FTA utilization and identify opportunities
- Audit-ready certificates of origin, with every calculation archived to defend against clawbacks
Combined with MIC-Cust’s special customs procedures such as bonded warehouse, inward and outward processing relief, and free trade zones, this helps you defer, reduce, or eliminate duty across the supply chain.
MIC's GTM suite works as an integrated layer on top of your existing ERP and logistics systems rather than as a separate silo. The connectivity is handled through MIC-EDIS (Enterprise Data Integration System), which automatically exchanges data with ERP, CRM, and warehouse systems, with third-party providers, and with customs authorities. The MIC SAP Connect is an interface, which is also listed on the SAP Certified Solutions Directory. In practice, this means:
- Bidirectional, automated data flow, so orders, deliveries, and bills of material come into MIC, while results such as customs status, tariff numbers, and screening outcomes are written back into your ERP
- Updates triggered automatically when documents are created or changed, with no duplicate manual entry
- Certified SAP interfaces for S/4HANA (including Cloud Private Edition) and ECC 6.0, following SAP's “Clean Core” principles so upgrades stay safe
- Support for non-SAP systems such as Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics
- The ability to monitor customs status and print documents without leaving your ERP
Keeping current with regulatory change is handled by MIC's Global Trade Content Service (GTCS), the data engine behind the platform, so your team never has to track changes manually across hundreds of authority sources. How it works:
- Coverage for more than 150 countries, including tariff schedules, duty and tax rates, exchange rates, export control and sanctions lists, rules of origin, and non-tariff measures
- A dedicated content team and established trade content partners (such as Mendel Verlag) monitor legislative and tariff changes worldwide
- Updates are checked by both the content provider and MIC, then pushed automatically into your system, with daily updates for fast-moving data such as sanctions lists and exchange rates
- The same maintained content feeds every module, so classification, origin, screening, and filing all use one consistent, current dataset
Return on a GTM investment comes from four main levers, with duty savings usually the largest and most measurable:
- Duty and tax savings, by systematically claiming FTA preferences and using special customs procedures (bonded warehouse, processing relief, free trade zones, and more) to lower landed cost, scaling with import volume and the share of trade eligible for preference
- Process efficiency, by pulling data directly from your ERP, auto-classifying goods, and automating declarations and supplier solicitation, which removes large volumes of manual work and lets trade teams handle more without adding headcount
- Risk and penalty avoidance, through automated, audit-logged screening and always-current content that reduce the risk of fines and shipment holds and strengthen the case for trusted trader status such as AEO
- Centralization and scalability, by replacing fragmented local tools with one global platform that lowers total cost of ownership as you expand into new markets
As a standard part of every engagement, MIC builds a business case on your actual trade data, including import volumes, duty spend, FTA eligibility, and transaction counts, to quantify your expected savings and payback period.
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