Overview of the Rolodex
As a cross border application that can prepare orders, bookings, bills of lading and for the U.S. the 7501 customs entry form, OTCS needs a rolodex. Where else are you going to keep foreign port codes, for example? We say this because we can envision future users of OTCS retaining their Rolodex information in a CRM (Customer Relationships Manager) from which we will have to port some address information over to ours. There is no getting over this since the Rolodex in OTCS is integral, it can not be an add on module.
When entering addresses you will note that you first start with the country then state or province and finally city. Zip or Postal codes, Streets and P. O. Boxes are optional and can be entered or modified afterwards, but you must always enter a country, state and city or the record will not save.
We are very concerned that addresses are formatted correctly for their individual countries. We have seen bills of lading with jumbled street, city, states and postal codes so that it was difficult to identify the actual consignee or notify party. This type of error not only is inconvenient, but it really may create a security threat as well.
As an example we show a U.S. Address
and a Spanish Address.
Note that the order of the city state and zip is switched. Also note that the Spanish Province of Sevilla is in parentheses and capitalized. The difference may seem trivial but in reality with machine read documents at CBP, the more that can be done to standardize a company and it's address, the more certain an identification is. Possibly a bill of lading with well identified shipper, consignee and notify party is less likely to have an inadvertent inspection of it's shipment.
In the maintenance section of OTCS we maintain records of countries and their codes as well their postal characteristics that allows us to format correctly on the fly.
Cross border trade involves regions as well countries. The EU is a region that comes to mind primarily. But we heard talk of a trade region stretching from Barcelona, Spain across southern France and terminating in Milan, Italy. OTCS can combine countries or provinces in different countries or states in one country into regions. These regions can be defined by the owner of OTCS for their own corporate purposes, say for example the Tri State (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) Sales region. Or better yet a region that includes only Fairfield County in Connecticut, the surrounding counties of New York City in New York and northern counties in New Jersey as a sales region.
It's a complicated world out their, what with mergers and acquisitions that are a part of corporate life. Most rolodex entries are expected to be companies that are a division of a larger entity. When entering small companies such as Joe's Trucking, for example, then the two fields will have the same name. This structure allows us also to correctly describe ports as well. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has several ports that on bills of lading would be labeled as New York. With the company division structure we can show New York, Port Newark for example.
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