Video Transcript

Jacob, Host at Logistics Degree:
Question: What does global trade and logistics entail and what would be a few jobs within that field of supply chain?

Corben, Supply Chain Manager:
Answer: Yeah so on the global side, take the trucking problems and just exponentially complicate them. So you’ve got a product that’s being manufactured overseas that’s got to get out of that warehouse, onto a boat, come to wherever your customers are. Get into that temporary warehouse on the coast and then get into a truck. Then get to your warehouse and keep going from there. So some jobs there. You might actually be able to travel and go visit those manufacturing facilities and talk to those vendors. You might have to wait until you’re more senior person should do that. You might just be sitting at a desk here in the states, you might be calling them, and that might mean you’re up at 5:00 AM or 10 PM talking to someone overseas. You could also, if you wanted to, maybe have a background in another language that can be a real asset here. So if you love Mandarin or Chinese, that can be a real asset. If you just know German by chance, maybe your family has ties there. That can be a huge asset as well. So Yeah. Oh, and one big interesting case study here is overseas. There’s the Chinese New year, which is basically where everything in China stops for I believe it’s two weeks. I’m not exactly sure, but it’s a substantial amount of time. And so if you’re planning global trade logistics, you’ve got to factor that in or all of a sudden you can’t get the thing that you thought you would get. So there’s all sorts of variables like that you have to factor in.

Alexander, Supply Chain & Procurement:
Answer: Global trade has many different areas, but then you have global trade management, you have a global buyer too. You even have a global procurement coordinator. It’s global trade, I would say, focuses more on the aspect of supply chain where your process, your manufacturing process is now a global manufacturing process, whether that’s making everything in America and shipping that product to Europe, that becomes global trade, whether that’s, you know, manufacturing, trying to bring it to America, whether that’s just procuring a metal in Sweden and bringing it to America to manufacture in America, that’s still global trade. You know, you have global trade analysts, which is somebody that analyzes all the pricing and import costs and the different import export laws to that exists for a company. And then you have specifically import export specialists to who go in and they make sure that all of the policies that the company they’re working for is up to date with global policies, but more towards making sure that. We’re still following different laws that exist, different prohibitive laws that exist that we can’t trade with a certain country or there’s certain taxes that have to be paid on every import from a certain country. So they really focus on those and make sure that the company is abiding by those laws and passes.

Nathan, Logistician:
Answer: What I know about it is that it comes with the challenges of dealing with compliance. Each country has their rules of how things get sent out and things come in. So how do you classify things to ensure that the countries are working with are happy and that you’re not screwing it up? There’s classification. That’s the type of work you’re doing and you want to be like a logistics analyst to get into that type of work.