What effect do free trade agreements have on your company’s operations?
Throughout the world, regional trade preference programs, such as North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mercosur, the Andean Pact and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) program, as well as tariff programs for lesser developed nations, such as the generalized system of preferences program, are in effect.
These programs define the origins of products and eligibility for substantial tariff preferences into countries within a specified trade region or into developed countries that grant preferences to emerging economies. Knowledge of the complex origin rules and duty-saving potential are essential to making decisions regarding the location of production and material sourcing and to securing the benefits provided by these preferential trade agreements.
Opportunity: Managing origin certification to achieve efficiency
PricewaterhouseCoopers’ OriginCoMpliance Services (OCM) is a web-based solution that is designed to facilitate the exchange of origin certification information throughout a supply chain. This innovative new service replaces error-prone and inefficient paper- based processes for requesting and issuing product level certification data.
Buyers who require origin certification can use OCM to solicit the required certification information from each of their suppliers. Suppliers who issue origin certification would use OCM to determine what origin certification is being requested of them by their customers and to electronically provide the origin certification. Both suppliers and customers can use the document management feature of the service to search for, look-up and retrieve, in both text and image formats, existing origin certification previously provided using OCM.
PricewaterhouseCoopers’ OCM can assist your company in being cost efficient and effective in managing its origin certification to obtain benefits from the applicable trade preference programs.
