Import Management

QAD Free Trade Agreement (FTA) provides the tools to determine origin under any Free Trade Agreements recognized by the World Trade Organization. The solution simplifies the process of soliciting, creating and managing all associated required FTA documentation for any industry,  in every region of the world. Your organization is able to automate and audit free trade agreement processes to ensure due diligence with the Rules of Origin regulation requirements.

FTA origin determination is done in real-time with every order shipment, and the Rules of Origin always use the latest master data to ensure the most up-to-date costs and material quantities are included in the analysis.

QAD has a team of dedicated professionals responsible for monitoring changes to free trade agreement regulations and published Rules of Origin. Content changes are issued periodically depending on the free trade agreement to ensure our customers are constantly kept up to date with the latest content data from the ever changing government legislation. The changes can be uploaded automatically via our ACU (Automated Content Upload) process or manually by installing the packs using custom QAD tools.

When performing FTA origin determination, numerous pieces of information are required for the analysis. Ensuring that this information is available for each transaction can be a time consuming process. Therefore, data integrity checks can be used to identify missing and invalid data for transactions. There is a predefined list of checks provided, which can be extended as part of the implementation. These checks are:

In addition to the prescribed Rules of Origin, the system supports configuring company-specific rules such as additional rule attributes, flexible RVC and de minimis thresholds to create buffers related to cost.

Certificates of Origin expire over time. It is important to keep a valid certificate of origin for sourced materials on hand at all times. This is to identify originating materials that contribute to the origination determination of the finished good and proof in the event of an audit. 

The Certificate of Origin solicitation tool allows for automated targeted emails to be sent requesting Certificates of Origin for the materials supplied. Further filtering can be done such as to only solicit Certificates of Origin for non-shifting materials since those that shift do not need to originate under a free trade agreement. This feature greatly reduces the number of emails going out as well as saves time vetting the inbound material data.

The compliance console provides information on the FTA origin determination carried out for a transaction. It identifies the compliance checks that were performed and the outcome of each of these checks. You can also drill down for detailed information.

The console is available to manage compliance issues for corrective action and provides users and managers with a centralized source of information for all checks performed and actions taken for a single transaction.

When hundreds or even thousands of orders are processed every day, managing compliance can become overwhelming. QAD FTA simplifies this process by alerting you only if there is an issue or situation that needs to be resolved. If an order or shipment does not have a compliance failure or warning, it simply flows  through  the  system  without generating an alert.

QAD FTA creates a permanent audit trail of the origin determination results associated with transactions that are processed in the system. The system contains a number of reports and filter mechanisms which can be used for audit analysis and proof of FTA origin. Some of the origin audit data capture points are: