Just before summer, Maarten van der Weijden swam the icy canals of the Elfstedentocht for 74 hours over four days, covering 195 km, passing through 11 cities, and raising over €6,1 million for cancer charities. The long-distance swimmer is no stranger to achievement—he won the gold medal in Beijing Summer Olympics, the World Championships in Seville, and was named Dutch Sportsman of the Year. Yet his most recent undertaking was hands-down the most challenging of his career, especially since it was his second attempt at the Elfstedentocht after falling just 10km short last year due to illness.
Van der Weijden is an inspiration, modeling how perseverance leads to success, and that no matter how difficult the challenge, one should never stop pushing forward. At C4T, we stand behind his laser-like focus on achievement, and are dedicated to swimming through the choppy waters of customs and trade compliance to transform customs management as we know it.
With ever-growing global trade,
increasingly complex agreements,
and changes to the political environment driving more and more regulations the waves keep getting bigger, but that won’t stop us.
We believe automation and digitalisation are the future of customs and trade compliance, and the key to pulling ahead of the competition by empowering borderless trade with minimal effort. What’s more, statistics support our belief.
- 62% of CEOs are making the business more digital (1)
- Nearly 2 out of 3 CEOs and CFOs anticipate business model change (2)
- Over 50% of Chief Supply Chain Officers say lack of a roadmap is the roadblock to digitalisation (3)
- 83% find implementing digital initiatives challenging (4)
At C4T, we have surveyed the waters and created the roadmap for digitalising customs and trade compliance. With each update to CAS, we make the implementation process easier, and we’re turning the tables on how customs management is viewed, bringing it from the back office to the boardroom, transforming what was once a cost center into a commercial weapon, and simplifying cumbersome and error-prone Excel spreadsheet processes with standardisation and end-to-end automation.
CAS is a collaborative hub that supports sharing and synchronization of processes between business partners and via Port Community Systems, executing regional or worldwide customs and trade compliance processes quickly and accurately, within one single platform. All customs-related data is centralised in CAS, and reporting can be rolled up to provide analytics and insights that inform business decisions. We are also investing in machine learning to ever increase accuracy and efficiency. The more data you enter into CAS, the smarter the system becomes.
As we look toward the future, companies that become masters of digital will pull to the forefront of their industries. Digitalisation will play a large role in supply chain management, including workflow collaboration tools, supply chain visibility, predictive analysis capabilities, and digital customs compliance.
C4T leads the pack when it comes to digitising customs and trade processes, and we have the roadmap to get our clients up and running quickly. We subscribe wholeheartedly to what Maarten van der Weijden has modeled: Going for the gold is not enough. We’re swimming the long distance to achieve what no one ever thought possible.
Sources:
(1) Gartner 2019 Top Predicts
(2) & (3) Gartner, CEO Survey: CIOs Should Guide Business Leaders Toward Deep-Discipline Digital Business, 2018
(4) Gartner, Supply Chain Conference 2019