Published: Jan 24, 2025

How a new approach to logistics and global trade could boost Australian business

Discover how new technology has the potential to remove barriers and make trade more efficient. 

International trade drives economic growth and creates millions of jobs. Cross-border trade in goods is now worth over $1 trillion per year – which represents 40% of Australia’s GDP.ⁱ So even small improvements to make regulations easier for businesses to follow have the potential to give the Australian economy a significant boost. 

How Australian businesses trade with global partners is constantly evolving. While trade volumes have grown significantly over the past decade, the rules, processes and technology simply haven’t followed suit. A recent survey found that 38% of Australian businesses that don’t trade globally felt they didn’t have enough information on how to trade in international markets.ⁱⁱ 

Some stakeholders perceive Australian cross-border trade rules to be both complicated and prohibitively expensive. For example, a single shipment can pass through up to 30 organisations before reaching its destination.

Australia has long recognised the need to simplify its trade systems to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and maintain competitiveness in global markets. However, efforts to implement a fully simplified trade system have faced challenges due to several reasons. These include: 

1. The complexity of existing systems which involves multiple stakeholders, including federal and state governments, regulatory agencies, customs, and private sector participants. Integrating these disparate systems into a unified, simplified framework is a complex and resource-intensive task. 

2. Funding constraints which hamper large-scale reforms. Implementing a streamlined trade platform requires significant investment in technology, infrastructure, and training. 

3. Legislative and regulatory challenges including complex interaction between domestic laws, international agreements, and regional trade obligations. 

4. The differing priorities and needs of diverse stakeholder groups, including small businesses, multinationals trade unions. 

5. Achieving consensus on the design and implementation of a simplified system can be challenging. 

6. A lack of digital maturity and the predominance of legacy systems and infrastructure that make it difficult to transition to a fully digital and simplified trade environment. 

7. An incremental approach over holistic reform including enhancements to the Integrated Cargo System (ICS) and customs processes, that fall short of creating a fully simplified, end-to-end trade system

Australia has recognised these shortcomings and is making strides toward improving its trade systems. The National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy aims to address inefficiencies and streamline processes. Efforts to digitise customs procedures and integrate data across agencies are ongoing. Collaboration with international partners to adopt global trade standards is also underway. 

However, Australia will likely need to accelerate its reforms to stay ahead. 

An example of the positive effect a holistic approach to trade and customs can have can be found In Singapore, where the government wanted to create a fully integrated system that could streamline and automate its customs processes, and continue innovating.
 

Singapore Customs: enhancing efficiency and security in customs regulatory operations on the cloud

Singapore Customs plays a proactive role in strengthening Singapore’s position as a global trade hub. It maintains the trade regulatory compliance, facilitation, and security. Singapore Customs had the vision for a more efficient and streamlined customs regulatory operations, backed by real-time insights.

Together with NCS, Singapore Customs embarked on a cloud-first transformation, re-platforming their legacy on-premises regulatory operations system onto the cloud. This not only alleviated the burden of maintaining physical data centres, but also allowed Singapore Customs to further improve regulatory operations and achieve cost savings. The innovations and improvements continue to solidify Singapore’s leading position in global trade.

Find out more by reading this detailed case study.

NCS Australia provides services and solutions in consulting, digital, applications and cloud. Our diverse workforce has delivered a wealth of large-scale, mission-critical, and multi-platform projects for governments and businesses nationally. The NCS Australia team is able to draw on experiences and resources from across the region to support public sector clients with delivering services that are personal, timely and secure.