Brimming with the spirit of buying and “once-in-a-year” deals, the holiday season is the most wonderful time of the year for retailers and consumers, and a busy time for every entity involved in the supply chain. With end of year purchases representing as much as 30% of annual sales for retailers, we also see significant challenges arising during the holidays for national customs authorities and logistics companies who need to ensure deliveries and goods move through borders efficiently.

 

The annual surge of imports places great strain on all the supply chain links during the holidays. More shipments mean more inspections by the authorities, who need to vigilantly verify the legitimacy of each shipment and rely today on mostly manual inspections post-arrival. This opens the door to significant trading delays and bottlenecks at the border, not to mention the potential for larger numbers of counterfeit and substandard goods, threats that national authorities simply don’t have the luxury of ignoring. And as more sanctions and regulations enter the customs fray, it becomes even harder to balance the vigilance of meeting ever-changing regulations in real time with much-needed momentum.

 

And while these issues are difficult enough to address in isolation, they tend to snowball when the holiday frenzy ensues—which becomes an even more difficult proposition for authorities to manage. So, how can they overcome these seasonal pain points in order to thrive?

 

Giving Customs the Gift of Pre-Arrival Inspections

 

By receiving all the necessary insight ahead of time, Customs can proactively contend with any upticks in volume. Publican’s Digital Shipment Vetting approach meets this head on as the first-and-only solution that can uncover previously undetectable risks in incoming shipments by combining huge masses of relevant case scenarios and billions of data points with deep contextual digital analysis to inspect 100% of the shipment pre-arrival.

 

This provides customs with a full multidimensional picture, with every entity connected to a shipment long before she reaches port. At the most crucial time of the year, Publican saves time and enables the flow of trade while ensuring no risks are missed.

 

Managing Fraud with Full Visibility

 

It’s the grey areas of the supply chain where illicit traders operate most successfully, and it’s here where Publican can illuminate to detect anomalies and patterns indicative of fraud. From minute details in the weight declaration to the shipper’s scope of business, Publican utilizes unconventional strains of data to unearth irregularities that lie deep within the digital ocean to help authorities interdict shipment carrying illicit, counterfeit, or substandard goods.

 

Achieving It All with Compliance

 

As the only solution endorsed by the World Customs Organization (WCO), Publican’s Digital Vetting Technology enables proactive real-time compliance with unique access, ensuring 100% of shipments are compliant with current regulations and sanctions. Publican utilizes one of its kind technology to provide visibility on all entities involved in a shipment, including association with child and forced labor, and flags goods that don’t comply.

 

Digital Vetting will ultimately save customs huge amounts of resources lost daily on processing suspicious-yet-legitimate shipments and play a vital role in remedying the bottleneck delays that continue to plague cross border trade, especially at this time of year. Authorities can become much less vulnerable and much more resilient to the dangers of deception and delay when they do arise and proactively facilitate trade at scale.

 

For more information about Publican’s ability to securely facilitate the free flow of trade, visit https://publican.ultra.global/.