Mastering tariff series Part 3: How to capture duty savings with ONESOURCE
This is the third in a series of blog posts examining product solutions that can help specialists and strategists master tariff compliance. In previous posts, we explored how ONESOURCE Free Trade Agreements and ONESOURCE Foreign Trade Zones can minimise the impact of tariffs.
Highlights:
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Compliance and supply chain specialists have never had a more prominent position as strategic advisors within organisations—and, unfortunately, have never faced more uncertainty than they do right now with the U.S’s ongoing tariff trade war.
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“Right now, with what’s going on with tariffs and regulations on international trading, they’ve become front-page news—and essential voices in the decision-making process.”
As their roles become increasingly in the spotlight, these specialists need to be equipped with the insights and confidence to propose solutions that can minimise the impacts from tariffs. Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE Global Duty Optimisation can provide the quality insights and help capture duty savings so that these specialists can confidently go into those conversations and deliver value to the business.
Today’s reality: Too much duty information from too many sources
The speed at which tariffs and regulations are changing is challenging to keep up with, and the information is coming from everywhere, which is something that didn’t happen before. “I never thought I’d have to learn about trade compliance requirements on X or Truth Social, but that’s where we’re at,” Martinez says.
Because these changes weren’t foreseen, companies haven’t scaled up their compliance teams to stay on top of the frequent changes. It’s impossible to manually update those often-daily updates because there’s not enough time in the day. So, any hope of using the latest information to advise on strategy is a fantasy. Add to this the complexity of supply chain management with its many moving parts and the need to send certificates of origin to suppliers— thousands of them—and you can see why manual processes are no longer possible without a massive increase in staff.
So, a solution that brings automation and updates content daily with new tariffs/regulations is necessary in today’s business environment. That’s where ONESOURCE comes in; it gives compliance and supply chain specialists the information and time to impress the C-suite and save the company money.
More from this blog series:
How ONESOURCE Global Duty Optimisation helps companies leverage duty suspension programs
ONESOURCE Global Duty Optimisation allows companies to use a network of duty minimisation and suspension programs to achieve cost savings and generate a high ROI. It includes insights into free trade agreements, foreign trade zones (FTZs), IMMEX/maquiladoras, and EU customs regimes to reduce or eliminate tariffs, and increase visibility of the product standards of the countries you trade in.
At the heart of every ONESOURCE solution is content and automation. Thomson Reuters has nearly 200 employees who check regulations daily and input changes into the ONESOURCE platform so that customers have the latest updated information. It’s something a small team at a company can’t do.
“When something changes, it’s very easy and quick for a person using one of our duty optimisation tools to do a quick scenario analysis and determine if they should change their sourcing or another variable. The tool will tell them if any such change will impact costs, and how,” Martinez says.
Although it’s an extremely easy tool to use, Global Duty Optimisation is thorough; it will tell users what taxes they’ll have to pay, import and export controls, and much more—a whole range of data that is governed by resources outside ONESOURCE. That’s because it integrates with other solutions, including other ONESOURCE products that capture external data, to provide a complete picture from a single source.
Rather than spending their time trying to pull that information from all these different places, users can get that information returned within seconds.
Global Duty Optimisation does more than give you numbers; its analysis and insights allow you to identify strategic opportunities. Trade Lane Analysis identifies the most favourable trade lanes and duty rates based on classification codes. It will tell you, for example, if you’re importing to the United States but your origin is Canada, Mexico, China, Vietnam, or Australia, what duties you’ll be paying and what free trade agreements are available.
By leveraging these insights, trade compliance professionals are equipped to strategically prioritise and maximise Free Trade Agreement (FTA) benefits on a large scale using ONESOURCE FTA Management.
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That kind of information will give compliance and supply chain specialists the confidence to risk exposure when they take their place at the executive table—and beyond.
“That confidence extends beyond the C-Suite table to when you’re being audited by customs,” Martinez insists. “We know that the compliance environment surrounding some of these changes is quite heightened. There is some fear within the business world about what happens now if I get it wrong and how exposed I could be.
“So that confidence then cascades down to users knowing that they’re submitting the right thing and they can back that up with documentation. They have an audit trail.” All of which makes that seat at the executives’ table mighty comfortable.
Are you ready to get the data and insights to be confident that your team is doing everything correctly to save the company money in its supply chain? If so, learn more about ONESOURCE Global Duty Optimisation.
At Thomson Reuters, we understand that navigating the complexities of tariff compliance in global trade requires a multifaceted approach. While no single solution can address every challenge associated with tariffs, our suite of products is designed to tackle key elements of these issues effectively.
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