"GE Healthcare has a very large shipping network with a large number of active parts going to many customers in different global economies," says Grabher, international trade compliance program leader. "We could not manually screen every single customer or effectively control the number of parts shipping to those countries without a system in place."
Any system the company acquired also needed to work with multiple ERP systems, he says, and be able to communicate with people in the field receiving the parts as well as logistics providers handling the movements. "We needed it to be able to send messages to our ERPs and transfer those messages electronically to smart phones and computers around the globe in an efficient manner."
GE Healthcare brought in multiple vendors for evaluation, after which it selected Amber Road. "Our decision was based on the user friendliness of its programming and its ability to seamlessly bolt onto multiple ERP systems," he says.
The company customized Amber Road's solutions to work with its ERPs, he says. "This entailed using notifications built into the Amber Road system so that all the work could be done within our ERP systems and messages customized so that our people could see what was going on with the shipments in their normal work platforms," he says.
"We screen all of our customers at the time of customer creation against the restricted and denied party lists," Grabher says. "Then we screen our shipments when an order comes in and again before it goes out the door. So we do three levels of screening before we ship anything to the end user." Since the company began using the trade compliance solutions several years ago, it has screened more than 3 million transactions, he says.
"We currently are screening everything on the export side and our next step, which is in the design phase, will be to screen for import controls."
