Exostar Forms Working Group to Meet Export Compliance Challenges

As demands of global export regulation compliance increase, B2B connectivity specialist aims to develop tools, best practices to reduce violations

As demands of global export regulation compliance increase, B2B connectivity specialist aims to develop tools, best practices to reduce violations

Herndon, VA — May 2, 2006 — B2B network Exostar has focused its Export Control Working Group (ECWG) on advancing in its goal to develop processes and enabling technologies to help multinational corporations meet the increasing demands of global export regulation compliance, the company has announced.

Made up of export control and compliance experts from aerospace and defense companies — including The Boeing Company, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce — the ECWG aims to develop tools and best practices to help multinational corporations enable key collaborative business processes efficiently while reducing the risk of regulatory violations, according to Exostar.

"Given the challenge of today's competitive global marketplace that requires the tracking and protection of assets, information and technology, it has never been more critical to establish and maintain an effective process for controlling business information," said Paula McDowell, director for international trade compliance at Rolls-Royce. "Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations worldwide mean that all employees must, as a priority, understand what it means to work in an open and transparent corporate environment."

As companies continue to embrace strategic outsourcing and the use of global design processes, governments around the world are cracking down on export violations and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) compliance. In today's digital age, the majority of violations involve the export of intellectual property and controlled data rather than physical goods.

For example, a simple e-mail attachment sent to an international colleague can constitute an expensive breach. In the United States, the average fine for an export control violation is $16.5 million, with some companies seeing fines of almost $50 million and individuals facing prison time. Other countries are also cracking down on export violations.

According to early findings by the ECWG, the biggest information control challenges companies are facing include:

  • More stringent enforcement of existing regulations.

  • Differing interpretations of regulations by individual jurisdictions.

  • Increasing globalization of the workforce and supply networks.

  • Increased risk to organizations as more employees and suppliers are required to interact with controlled information.

  • Different regulations for each geographic area in which international companies operate.

  • The need to train employees about all of the policies and procedures that need to be followed.
"The goal of the ECWG is to create templates and workflow processes that companies can customize to ease compliance and create accountability for export control issues," said Halbert Crumes, product manager for e-collaboration at Exostar. "With input from industry leaders such as The Boeing Company, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce, combined with Exostar's history of helping major international corporations streamline their supply networks and extend their external business processes, we are confident that we can create strong solutions to help ease the burdens of these complicated, but important, regulations."

The information management platform for these templates and processes is ForumPass, Exostar's online collaboration solution. Exostar said that more than 300 companies already use ForumPass to maintain secure access control to sensitive information, provide audit trails and improve efficiency, such as reducing cycle times by 50 percent and manual paperwork by 75 percent.

Initially launched in 2000, Exostar was founded to support the complex trading needs of the world's largest aerospace and defense companies, including BAE SYSTEMS, The Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin Corp., Raytheon Co. and Rolls-Royce. Today, it offers on-demand B2B connectivity solutions to provide business collaboration, secure infrastructures and visibility and synchronization for 23,000 trading partners worldwide.


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