Development has been driven directly by the member retailers themselves, explains Jim Schwab, product director of the Retail Exchange’s worldwide trade logistics, with the United Kingdom’s leading supermarket, Tesco, leading the way. With stores in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Malaysia, Poland, Thailand and the United Kingdom?and a global supplier base?it’s a fair bet that if the system works for Tesco, it will work for most retailers, says Schwab.

"Two different suppliers of bed linen in a given Far Eastern country can have widely different tariffs levied on their products, with some attracting antidumping duties of 200 percent," says Stuart Blackery, a supply chain development project manager at Tesco, now assigned to the Retail Exchange’s development team. "The buyer in the homeware department really needs to know that information, and the NextLinx data is six weeks ahead of hard copy in the U.K."

But no single product currently meets the full spectrum of international trade requirements, says Michael Bittner, former research director of supply chain strategies at AMR Research’s West Coast office in Irvine, Calif. And while the potential lure of duty drawback and the like is attractive, it is often fear that is driving companies to make a choice now, as they weigh the mounting costs and risks of noncompliance.

The Holy Grail of global trade, says Bittner, involves more than compliance and documentation; it also demands carrier management and shipment visibility. Consequently, of late there’s been a spate of acquisitions and alliances as vendors attempt to acquire those capabilities. The DuPont implementation, for example, comes courtesy of G-Log’s partnership with trade compliance vendor Xporta.

Meanwhile, CIOs impatient with the speed at which the software industry is catching up with their needs, must develop their own homegrown capabilities, often in partnership with small startups.

Global electronics contract manufacturer Solectron of Milpitas, Calif., which assembles computers and other high-tech equipment for companies such as IBM, Lucent and Sony wanted a Web-based tool usable internally, as well as by suppliers and customers. With 5,000 shipments in motion at any one time, shipment management was clearly important. But so was documentation and compliance.

"When we bring on a new supplier in China, we need to ensure that they could produce the right documentation to ship to a plant in Brazil," says Jim Molzon, Solectron vice president of global logistics. "We put a specification together and went to the marketplace and found there wasn’t a single vendor that offered everything. The carrier management and visibility people weren’t good at compliance and documentation, and vice versa."