The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed regional free trade agreement. As of 2014, twelve countries throughout Asia Pacific have participated in negotiations on the TPP:
Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. With TPP in place, tariffs would be eliminated between the TPP countries that allow liberalized and fair access to the foreign goods and service markets.
TPP Impact
The impact of the TPP is it will overlap with the existing FTA agreements between any of the 12 member countries. However, certain TPP countries wouldn’t allow particular products to trade under the TPP agreement; they would still like to continue with the imposed barriers using the existing FTA agreements.
From an SAP Global Trade Services customer standpoint, it is important to address this change immediately. Addressing these changes is crucial and unfortunately as this is a new exception, out of the box GTS functionality will not suffice for these cases. Even your current version of SAP GTS only offers the use of multiple FTAs per destination country but doesn’t offer overlapping FTAs per destination country. To address the TPP agreement, the GTS system would need to be set up to best determine which FTA qualifies the products, keeping in mind that certain products per member country still applies Tariffs and wouldn’t go after TPP. The qualification means that out of 2 FTAs, we would like the system to have the intelligence to select the best FTA for the product (remember, this is not the worst case scenario).
In preparation of the likely up and coming TPP agreement, Krypt’s Preference Expert team proactively did the extensive research and put together a development that would help their customers ready to deploy when TPP arrives. The new development would help them meet the requirements of selecting TPP vs. Existing FTAs and help them reap the benefits from day 1 and thus avoiding compliance conflicts, mistakes and oversight. For more information, please contact info@kryptinc.com.
