On October 5th, Amway organised an innovation event on Customs and Supply Chain Security Innovation, with the CORE Innovation Agenda as a central topic. Amway is one of the world's largest direct selling businesses with an annual turnover of almost € 9 billion. For this event, they invited their networking partners, including customs, freight forwarders, agents, logistic service providers and knowledge partners (about 50 attendants from different countries such as The Netherlands, USA, Ukraine and Russia) to their European Distribution Centre in Venlo, The Netherlands to explore what the CORE vision is about and what it means for Amway’s corporate strategy.
The event started with a corporate introduction by Mr. Greg Schroeder, Director Global Trade of Amway Supply Chain Services. Followed by Mr. Frank Heijmann, Head of Trade Relations at Dutch Customs Administration and active CORE partner, who elaborated on the data pipeline concept and how it is incorporated in their customs supervision and enforcement vision. Finally, Gerwin Zomer from TNO and technical coordinator of CORE highlighted the CORE Innovation Agenda and how the data pipeline concept is being demonstrated and applied in the development of new supervision models, such as trusted tradelane supervision.
This was followed by a vivid discussion on the feasibility of the underlying concepts and the key challenges towards full deployment. Amway confirmed the strategic relevance of the CORE Innovation Agenda and is eager to explore next steps in the realization of this innovation roadmap. Also other attendants, such as Fontys Hogeschool and compliance solution providers were eager to help contributing to the CORE innovation roadmap. As such, the event was a successful broader stakeholder engagement event and reconfirming the strategic relevance of the CORE agenda.