Canadian Lawyer InHouse

29 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE SEPTEMBER 2017 M anaging compliance in a fast-growing company that spans multiple jurisdic- tions in North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and China can be a major challenge, but Elliot Burger and the legal team at ATS Automation Tooling Systems saw an oppor- tunity to leverage compliance and business benefits in rolling out new trade manage- ment software. ATS is an engineering firm headquarted in Cambridge, Ont. that specializes in fac- tory-wide automation systems, serving mul- tiple fields such as automotive, life sciences, nuclear energy and consumer products. From a compliance perspective, ATS was a victim of its own success, says Burger, direc- tor, global trade compliance and legal counsel with the company. "We've grown fairly ro- bustly in the last 10 years." That growth had resulted in 24 manufac- turing facilities in 18 countries using seven different enterprise resource planning sys- tems and an employee base of about 4,000 people speaking 13 different languages. "Just from the start that's a compliance challenge that we had to deal with. Beyond that, because of the acquisitions, we ended up with accounts payable groups and supply chain management groups that were some - what fragmented who had historical rela- tionships from a trade perspective and were operating on a regional basis and not think- ing about the global compliance concerns of the parent entity," says Burger. "Trade compliance is one of the fastest moving areas of compliance out there and perhaps one of the fastest moving areas of law. And that's at the best of times and we're all aware of what's happening now in terms of speeding up those challenges," he says. Valuable commercial terms negotiated by legal were at times left out of orders or sub - stituted by local buyers. With reporting and record-keeping functions located in each country, ATS legal needed to find a solution to the compliance gap. The challenge was heightened by the ab - sence of a corporate-wide ERP system and a lack of centralized control over multiple supply chain and accounts payable groups in individual subsidiaries around the world. "When our legal group sat down and as - sessed what was in front of us we realized we weren't going to be able to unify the pur- chase order management system or the ERP systems across the company, so we weren't able to draw on the typical transparency tools a business would normally rely upon," he says. "So we had to come up with some - thing more innovative." The answer was a global trade manage- ment system where all incoming and out- going parts, services and end-use product orders could be compiled, defined, catego- rized and analyzed. A system was custom built for ATS, with ATS spelling out the specific requirements of its compliance program. The TMS solu - tion ATS chose gave the company a portal where the company could track all freight movements across the company with a cen- tral view to providing compliance advice. "It's given the legal group the transpar- ency we want from a trade perspective. We have a portal to put all due diligence on our suppliers, our customers, our third parties, we can send out compliance messaging to all divisions on a single portal. You can also put training on the portal and that's important given how quickly trade compliance is mov - ing right now," says Burger. The TMS allows policies and procedures to be distributed and implemented globally, and due diligence on suppliers, customers and third parties to be managed and stored. In the absence of centralized control, ATS' various supply chain groups were collectively employing 55 different freight forwarders and 13 different trade brokers. As a result, the AP groups were receiving thousands of freight shipment invoices per month with little information on the under - lying orders or shipping cost implications. ATS legal simplified the relationships with external service providers, and alleviated the administrative burden of operating a multinational supply chain system, while building a tool that served the compliance needs of the parent company. Burger estimates it will save the company $2.4 million when rolled out worldwide. IH Category: Compliance Department size: Small Compay: ATS Automation Tooling Systems Inc. (back, left to right) Steve Gillespie, senior legal counsel, Stewart McCuaig, VP, GC, (front, left to right) Doug Rose, senior legal counsel, Elliot Burger, director global trade compliance & legal counsel. RAMESH PURADCHITHASAN Compliance challenge results in consolidated view for manufacturer By Jennifer Brown

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