Attend the Definitive ACAS Web Seminar or View the Recording

A joint U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) program, Air Cargo Advanced Screening (ACAS) require data to be submitted to U.S. Customs Border Protection (CBP) any time before cargo is loaded at a foreign airport.

ACAS will come into force on June 12th, 2019 after a 12 months grace period. The clock is now ticking toward the final enforcement date. At a practical level, are you ready? Join us for a web seminar, Air Cargo Advance Screening (ACAS), The Definitive Educational Event, applicable to:

• Customs brokers
• Container freight stations
• Express consignment carrier facilities
• Air carriers

Our web seminar has all the information you need to enable compliance at a practical level.

Descartes Evolution 2019, our annual global user and partner conference, has wrapped up, and it was another year highlighting customer success, insights into the past year’s innovations and upcoming planned roadmaps. There was a record number of attendees and sessions, which was fantastic. With so many speakers, however, I found myself torn as to which sessions to attend while also finding the time to talk to as many customers as possible. I have provided a brief overview of the Purchased Transportation track for those who could not attend, and for the customers who came but could not get to all the sessions they wanted.

In the early ecommerce days of the 2000s, consumers were happy that they could simply buy products online. Many goods were not available locally and consumers enjoyed the convenience of ecommerce. By 2010 and in the years following, this had changed. With the proliferation of online stores, goods suddenly became available anywhere. As a result, consumers became “price buyers” and searched for the cheapest option. Today, price buyers still exist, but the modern marketplace has seen the rise of “service buyers”.

A service buyer is a modern customer who expects to decide where and when they want their goods delivered. It’s all about convenience and options, and this is where top performing ecommerce companies differentiate themselves.

One of the biggest opportunities to dramatically improve supply chain performance occurs when traditional supply chain functions are decomposed and reinvented as integrated business processes. Few supply chain practitioners would dispute that notion. However, when it comes to their technology strategy, too many practitioners end up deploying their transportation management system (TMS) or multiple systems in silos: outbound TL/LTL, parcel, inbound, international, etc.  The challenge facing supply chain practitioners who want to achieve breakthrough performance improvement is to understand the value and difference of converging TMS and connecting to their trading partners.

Breaking down the silos is not as simple as integrating the various existing applications. Instead, we are talking about how the business process would be fundamentally different or have completely new capabilities if the technology silos didn’t exist and multiple functions had been designed together in the first place. Part of the problem supply chain practitioners face is stepping out of the business process paradigms that have been dictated by technological limitations of the past. Applications on the same technology stack do not necessarily address the issue. Sometimes it takes new technologies or disruptive business practices to cause us to rethink what we have done in the past. Currently, the market pressures of the Amazon effect, coupled with the capacity crunch are perfect drivers to force this change.