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GE Healthcare Remedies Complex Trade Compliance Operations
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- System Integration
- Data Science Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
GE Healthcare ships products from over 145 locations and faces an increasingly complex supply chain spanning multiple international borders, time zones, and regulatory environments. Over 40% of imports are destined for the United States, and 60%-70% of all global shipments are sent to intra-company locations for assembly and packaging. All other shipments are sent directly to customers, which are typically large hospital networks or resellers. With subsidiaries, suppliers, distributors, manufacturing facilities, carriers, brokers, and customers located worldwide, operations were fragmented and difficult to manage. Import and export compliance for the products being shipped is complicated. Many of the company’s goods fall under a dual-use classification — implying a potential for military use, requiring special licenses and documentation. Accuracy in all details is essential to determine proper export controls and the corresponding documentation to avoid potentially significant fines and cross-border delays. It became crucial for each business unit to automate its trade compliance processes — including product classification, restricted party screening, order-to-shipment compliance screening, and the generation of export documentation. Because of the range of borders crossed, it was equally important to ensure that any trade compliance software application used the most current regulatory data. Since the business units were operating on different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, the company needed a solution that seamlessly integrated all these systems using a common framework.
About The Customer
GE Healthcare, a division of General Electric®, provides transformational medical technologies and devices to improve patient care. The company specializes in medical imaging, medical diagnostics, clinical systems, and patient monitoring systems. This broad range of products and services helps healthcare providers diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions more accurately. The company has more than 50,000 employees committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in 160 countries worldwide.
The Solution
Following a competitive evaluation of the technology’s functionality and integration capabilities, e2open was selected to manage the global trade compliance process. The e2open platform creates a flexible environment for sharing information with supply chain partners and establishes a 'global transaction' for managing related party trade. This also enables users to view information on imports and exports simultaneously. Users can electronically send pre-entry instructions directly to brokers without waiting for the physical goods to arrive, thus expediting cycle times and improving overall efficiency. This ability to rapidly coordinate information was a key selection criterion. Most importantly, GE Healthcare needed a solution and partner that could grow with them, adapt to changes in business processes, perform systems upgrades, and quickly integrate new compliance regulations. E2open provides both scalability and flexibility as more business divisions are added to this global compliance initiative. The new system to automate trade compliance is composed of the following intelligent applications: e2open Export Management, e2open Import Management, and e2open Global Knowledge®.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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