Logistics as a Service

Logistics – especially international logistics – is time-consuming and full of potential traps for the inexperienced. Emily Santa Maria, Licensed Customs Broker at CentricsIT, explained in an earlier installment how our IT team leverages our global logistics network to solve clients’ global IT maintenance and hardware needs. As we’ve evolved as a company, however, so have our service offerings. We don’t only relieve the pressure of international hardware maintenance anymore. With logistics as a service, we have established a comprehensive global trade system that provides solutions for your every import/export need.

Logistics as a Burden

You may have chosen, for example, to centralize your procurement facilities within the US, but you maintain a number of satellite facilities in various countries. Any time you need to ship equipment to those international sites, you’re faced with a grueling litany of requirements to meet and several complications to avoid, including:

• Proper hardware packaging
• Secure chain of custody
• Applications for correct VAT numbers and insurance
• Compliance restraints and assurances, etc.
• And (potential) Tax/Customs and Border Protection penalties if anything goes wrong

And that’s just to name a few. Imagine the logistics necessary to ship 150 upgraded servers to your data center in Dubai, 40 printers to your Ottawa offices, and 300 APs to your new facility in Beijing. You may know the import laws and guidelines for the US, but ensuring the accuracy of each shipment across multiple international borders is a daunting task. In the meantime, Dubai needed those servers last week, Ottawa is limping along with its outdated hardware, and Beijing can’t start operations until it’s fully online. You can’t afford to lose time at the border due to seizures, and your OPEX most likely doesn’t have a line item in it for “license and tax penalties.”

You need to make sure that your hardware is shipped correctly the first time.

Global, but Not Yet Equipped

Global shipments often require expertise and resources that you do not have readily in-house. Until you employ a full-time shipping and compliance professional, you’re left to figure it out yourself and hope for the best–or to outsource.

Our highly-experienced shipping experts—in congruence with our high-capacity facilities—provide turn-key, international shipping solutions for every hardware scenario. No longer do you need to struggle through the process on your own; all you need to do is tell us what you need shipped where and what compliance strictures we need to meet.

We’ll take it from there.

Logistics as a Service (LaaS)

The turnkey shipping service delineated below is what we like to call “Logistics-as-a-Service,” or LaaS. Here’s how we do it.

Packaging Makes Perfect

We’ve been in the shipping business for over a decade now. We are experts at packaging.

Our highly-trained warehouse team regularly (and successfully) prepares internationally-bound hardware for overseas transport. We have the years of experience and the tools to securely package, palletize, and ensure the safe delivery of all of your units.

More specifically, for commonly shipped equipment like laptops, hard drives, memory, CPU’s, etc., our technicians use specially engineered, manufacturer-quality boxes with hard foam inserts to protect the hardware. For more irregularly-shaped, unique equipment and for partially assembled units, our technicians use our customizable expanding foam machine to add tailored security into the packaging.

With CentricsIT LaaS, the packaging process is optimized for each piece of your hardware to ensure its safe delivery.

Unbroken Chain-of-Custody

We only contract with highly-vetted, experienced transportation partners, both internationally and here in the US. As such, we establish and maintain a strict and universalized procedure to ensure the security of your equipment.

We use point-to-point, dedicated trucks and drivers—“dedicated” meaning that the truck does not stop or pick up other clients’ units along the way. Once your equipment is packaged and loaded up, each truck is sealed with a serialized lock that informs us (and you) immediately if there is any unauthorized access during shipment. Moreover, our drivers take pictures (and upload them in real-time) of each locking mechanism at all stages of transport, as listed below.

• Before the trucks leave our CentricsIT warehouse
• If/when drivers are relieved by other team members
• When trucks are loaded onto container ships
• When the trucks arrive at their designated location

Through secure packaging and shipment protocols, CentricsIT is able to meet all of your compliance needs.

The Confidence to Make It Happen

Because of our extensive global network of strategic partners, CentricsIT maintains close relationships with the IOR specialists at each international location who know the ins-and-outs of their particular import and export laws and regulations. Not only that, CentricsIT has a full-time Licensed Customs Broker on staff. CentricsIT LaaS legitimizes your shipments to Customs and Border Protection from both sides of the border, thus avoiding delays, penalties, and seizures.

Let the CentricsIT LaaS experts shoulder the burden and sort out the red tape. All you have to do is tell us the address.