It’s expensive to move product across borders, with the location of a vendor’s manufacturing plant playing a major part. For example, it might be unusually expensive to ship products in and out of a particular country, due to the frequency of flights to and from its airports. It’s difficult to monitor and control costs and factors such as these contribute to increased costs of global logistics, which is simply passed on to the end-user organisations. But it is not all bad news. There are some countermeasures organisations can take to minimise logistics costs, such as order consolidation, multimodal transport, sea freight versus air freight, and so forth. The best cost-saving strategy, however, would be to outsource all procurement and logistics to a supply chain service provider that has sufficient expertise and experience in international logistics and know exactly how and where to save. Attempting to handle logistics in-house without the proper expertise often leads to higher costs because it’s not part of the organisation’s core focus. All too often, organisations who attempt to handle logistics on their own run into a host of problems, calling in the experts at the last minute at a far higher cost than if they’d simply outsourced the process from the start. In addition to fuel costs, import duties and taxes are other areas where organisations can save by ensuring they’re not overcharged by customs and that goods are cleared in the most cost-efficient way.
Goods should be tariffed and classified correctly on the commercial invoice to ensure that there are no unnecessary costs or misdeclaration of duties or tariffs. This process can save a great amount on large-scale imports, provided the procurement and logistics partner has an understanding of the product and its environment.