Recent Trade & Tariff Perspectives

November 11, 2022  |  Ivana Gavroski  Product Development Manager

Managing customs within your supply chain involves many responsibilities—from managing compliance to mitigating import costs whenever possible. Throw in ongoing and evolving customs and trade policy developments, such as a new forced labor law or expiring duty exclusions, suddenly you are juggling more responsibilities than you planned.

Navisphere now offers U.S. Customs Analytics, our new business intelligence tool that makes it easier than ever to manage your customs activity, improve import processes and know which supply chain developments warrant attention.

Watch this week's Trade & Tariff Perspective:

The U.S. Customs Analytics tool consolidates your customs activity and provides strategic insights into where you can potentially mitigate risk, reduce cost, assess carrier performance and entry timeliness—all while staying on top of ever-changing trade policy and customs requirements.

Whether you’re looking for a high-level overview of your customs activity or a deep SKU-level analysis, this business tool can provide both macro and micro viewpoints. The business intelligence tool compiles and analyzes your customs data for you—saving you the time and hassle of doing it yourself.

Key features of the U.S. Customs Analytics tool include:

• Dynamic and transparent data: The data is refreshed daily for near real-time visibility, so you can see exactly what C.H. Robinson clears on your behalf
• Navisphere platform: As part of our Navisphere digital platform, only one login is needed for all your business units, making it easy for multiple stakeholders to access all the features
• Historical data: A five-year history of your customs data is available to help you track organizational change and compliance over time 

To give you visibility into your total customs spend, the business intelligence tool keeps track of all the different types of duties, taxes, and fees associated with the products you import. For example: many products imported from China require importers to pay an additional type of duty, called a provisional duty. If you only have visibility into one total duty amount owed to import a product, you can easily miss what really makes up your total customs spend.

Our U.S. Customs Analytics tool simplifies this by providing both a high-level overview and a deeper analysis of how your total spend is allocated across duties, taxes, and fees. This further allows you to easily track changes over time and identify potential missed savings opportunities for all your business units.

In addition, a deeper sourcing analysis is provided through your customs landed cost, which allows you to know where you may be paying more to source a specific product from one supplier versus another in your supply chain. 

To save you time, the U.S. Customs Analytics tool compiles metrics and key performance indicator (KPI) reports to help you more easily assess your carrier utilization and on-time entry performance. This feature does the work for you regardless of whether C.H. Robinson handles the transportation.

Our business intelligence tool also helps you track performance against a set target over time and see how many days prior to arrival your customs entries are submitted on average.

Data integrity is crucial in risk assessment and mitigation. With the U.S. Customs Analytics tool, you get near real-time visibility and full transparency into the customs activity C.H. Robinson handles on your behalf.

To take risk assessment a step further, the U.S. Customs Analytics tool provides you with individual risk overview cards highlighting potential risks within various aspects of your supply chain—from product classifications to supplier relationships. Each risk overview card calls out anomalies and other areas of potential risk in your data.

The U.S. Customs Analytics tool also helps you assess relationship risk through an interactive global view of your suppliers, so you can quickly determine the potential impact of new trade policy and customs requirements. Consider the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) that recently went into effect or the increasing enforcement of Priority Trade Issues (PTIs), and whether further analysis is needed within your supply chain.

Our information is compiled from a number of sources that to the best of our knowledge are accurate and correct. It is always the intent of our company to present accurate information. C.H. Robinson accepts no liability or responsibility for the information published herein.