"Maybe they couldn’t get all of it back, but a significant proportion could be claimed if companies kept better track of things," he says.

DuPont Gets It Right

Keeping better track of things is exactly what chemical giant DuPont aims to do, says Steve Cohen, CIO of the Wilmington, Del.-based company’s global sourcing and logistic services. Most years, DuPont ships more 20-foot containers of freight from the United States than any other business?80,000 of them in 2001?packed with famous DuPont brands such as Teflon, Tyvek and Kevlar. (The company that perennially vies with DuPont for first place? America Chung Nam, which ships wastepaper to China.) "Only the government ships more stuff," Cohen brags. And with such massive quantities of inventory continuously in transit, much of it through third-party freight-forwarding companies, keeping tabs on it all is quite a challenge.

But next month, according to Cohen, the first phase of a system to do just that will go live. TransOval (a word play on DuPont’s oval-shaped logo) will enable DuPont to track each of the more than 1 million shipments it makes across international borders each year. That will generate better customs and shipping documentation, which will produce fewer border holdups. That means DuPont products will spend less time waiting in warehouses. And it will also mean bigger drawback checks, says Cohen.

DuPont has woken up to the fact that more efficient management of international trade processes offers a real opportunity to add dollars to the bottom line. To do that, businesses are turning to specialist international trade software systems from companies such as Fasturn, G-Log, NextLinx and Vastera. Vastera, for example, is credited by Ford with helping the automotive giant generate savings of more than $1 billion a year.

As automation projects go, that’s a pretty hefty ROI.

Importing: The Fluctuating Cost of Bed Sheets

The rules for importing goods make up a volume one and a half inches thick. Of course, that’s way too slender a volume for lawmakers, so further guidance is contained in the linked 4-inch-thick volume of the Code of Federal Regulations.

But to actually import anything, you’ll need the item’s relevant identification code, which is contained in the two-volume, 8-inch-thick Harmonized Trade Schedule of the United States, published by the Office of Tariff Affairs and Trade Agreements of the United States International Trade Commission. This handy document is used to determine the applicable tariff for the item you’re importing. And read it very, very carefully. Leather gloves attract one tariff, wool gloves another. And would that be lined or unlined gloves? Again, different tariffs apply. A T-shirt with a logo on it attracts a different tariff than one without, as does a shirt with a button on the breast pocket as opposed to one without. And that’s without taking into account the vagaries of geography. Animal ear tags, for example, attract especially punitive tariffs if they happen to come from New Zealand.