Est. 2001 ◆ Six continents
Material, financial, information. When the three flows agree, integrity exists. When they don’t, SIMS finds the difference and prices it.
Three flows, reconciled
Lot ledger
Integrity score
{{ conScore }}/100
{{ conWeak }}
{{ conCaption }}
30+ years
Engineering trusted-trade systems
14 years
Consecutive years training CBP auditors
1,500+
CBP regulatory auditors trained
6 continents
Government and enterprise engagements
How the measurement works
Three flows reconciled on one record. Where the material, financial and information flows disagree, the deviation is named, scored and priced, lot by lot.
Built from records you already keep. No new instrumentation to begin.
Inside the engine →Three flows, reconciled
Lot ledger
Integrity score
{{ conScore }}/100
{{ conWeak }}
{{ conCaption }}
What we do
Every engagement tests whether the material flow, the financial flow, and the information flow tell the same story. Where they diverge, we find cost, risk, delay, or integrity failure, and engineer the controls that close it.
01
CTPAT, AEO/OEA and PIP across the full lifecycle: eligibility strategy, Minimum Security Criteria gap assessment, Security Profile and portal submission, business-partner screening, validation preparation, remediation, and managed annual maintenance.
Trusted-trader programs →02
Make reasonable care visible, repeatable and testable while paying no more duty than the law requires: classification, valuation, origin, trade remedies, broker governance, audit readiness, and lawful recovery.
Compliance & duty performance →03
Make tampering, diversion, theft and unexplained handoffs detectable and evidentiary: custody mapping, seals and tracking, anomaly detection, incident reconstruction, and secure-corridor and green-lane design.
Cargo integrity →04
The practitioner layer between policy and operations for customs administrations: national AEO/OEA architecture, risk and selectivity, post-clearance controls, pilots, stakeholder adoption, and capacity building.
Customs modernization →05
Design the network for total landed cost, service, resilience, customs exposure and custody risk, not freight cost alone: network and inventory analysis, 3PL sourcing, cross-border operating design, SLAs and KPIs.
Analysis & operating design →06
Turn shipment, customs, financial and compliance data into continuous evidence and usable decisions: interoperability and API layers, custody-event records, anomaly alerts, analytics, and AI-supported review under human governance.
Technology & data →Two ways in
The same method serves the enterprise moving regulated goods and the administration deciding whether to trust it. That is why a programme designed for one is credible to the other.
For enterprises
Quantified exposure from records you already keep, then the controls and filings that close it.
◆Trusted-trader certification and validation preparation
◆Customs compliance, classification, valuation and origin
◆Duty recovery, drawback and channel leakage
◆Cargo integrity and custody evidence
For governments
National programme architecture, risk methodology, secure corridors and institutional capability.
◆AEO/OEA programme design and modernization
◆Risk, selectivity and post-clearance control
◆Secure corridors, e-seals and interoperability
◆Officer and validator training
The discipline behind SIMS
SIMS began in applied mathematics and supply chain engineering, not security consulting. For more than three decades the firm has applied quantitative modeling and operations research to one question: how do you engineer a supply chain to perform as intended?
Run a chain to that standard and security stops being an expense line. It becomes the residue of good engineering, and it can be proven rather than asserted.
A disciplined supply chain is
Actual inputs approach planned inputs.
Actual outputs approach planned outputs.
Inputs become outputs without unnecessary waste.
Three Immutable Flows™
What physically moved.
What money moved with it.
What the records say occurred.
When the three flows agree, integrity exists. When they don’t, SIMS finds the difference.
The operating thesis
Looking everywhere is how consulting bills hours. Knowing exactly where to look is how a supply chain gets fixed.
Traditional engagements scope the whole estate and report months later, so cost scales with scope. SIMS establishes what should have happened, reconciles it against what did, and opens only the exceptions. Cost scales with exceptions.
The arithmetic
A population of 1,329 entry lines resolved to a finite set worth opening. Everything else is evidenced and left alone.
The method, in five moves
What the contracts, the tariff and the programme say should have happened.
Records the business already keeps. No new instrumentation to begin.
Where the two disagree. The discrepancy is the finding, and it is finite.
Priced and graded: verified impact, modeled exposure, recoverable opportunity.
Only the set that carries consequence, each with an owner and a remedy.
Seal the flow. Secure the chain.
It starts at the container door. The physical layer makes every touch verifiable. The intelligence layer scores what those events prove. The financial layer is where it lands, budget impact, cash released, and an ROI the CFO can carry into the annual plan.
S1 · Seal it, the physical layer
Tamper-evident seals, telemetry, and monitored custody at every handoff. Every touch becomes a recorded event, verified or flagged. This is the layer competitors don't have: hardware in the field, not just dashboards.
SEAL INTACT · LOT 88231 · 14:02:11 EST
S2 · Score it, the intelligence layer
Every custody event feeds one weighted score across five dimensions, Channel 20%, Revenue 25%, Trace 25%, Trade 20%, Custody 10%. A credit score for the supply chain: one number a CFO can track quarter over quarter.
Score yours free →S3 · Secure the $, the financial layer
Every point below 100 resolves to a line an executive already owns: diversion recovered to the lot, duty refunded, rebate overpayment stopped, dwell converted to working capital. Graded by confidence class, verified, modeled, recoverable, so the business case survives finance review.
RECOVERED YTD · $5.5M · ENFORCEABLE
The order never changes
Systems serve strategy, not the reverse. The SIMS Integrity Platform does not replace expert judgment, it gives expert judgment continuous visibility, structured evidence, and scale. Thirty years of reading a supply chain by hand is what the platform was built to run continuously.
Thirty years of turning data into wisdom. The opportunity now is doing it continuously.
Start here
No pitch deck. We look at the exposure in the data you already keep, and tell you what it is worth measuring properly.
Results
Two kinds of result, reported separately: money returned to the P&L, and the operating metrics that produced it. Representative engagements, clients anonymized, the numbers are theirs.
Recognition & speaking engagements
Dan García delivered the opening session of the Virtual Seminar and Forum “Cargo Traceability” on 4 September 2026, to customs administrations of the Americas and the Caribbean, hosted by the Customs and Tax Institute (IAT) of SUNAT and the WCO Regional Training Centre in Peru, with more than 411 customs officers attending from 19 countries.
“The technical analysis and rigor with which you addressed the reconciliation of physical, documentary, and financial flows represent a valuable contribution to the modernization of control processes throughout the region.”
Carlos Rafael Chirinos Gómez, National Intendant
Customs and Tax Institute (IAT) · SUNAT · WCO Regional Training Centre, Peru
Letter No. 000087-2026-SUNAT/1S0000 · Callao, 9 Sept 2026
Click to enlarge
What was delivered
A two-hour programme on physical custody evidence, the eight-layer custody architecture, and coordinated border inspection, built around the three flows of trade, and the gap between the digitised information flow and the physical one. Delivered to customs control specialists across the region.
Recovered, in dollars
Representative engagements. Clients anonymized, the numbers are theirs.
National customs authority · North Africa
brought under one national custody metric
Five gateway ports sealed inside a month under a GLaaS™ green-lane program. Every tampered seal alarms within 60 seconds, the compensating control that lets inspection fall to 1-5% of clean shipments without losing the flow.
Global health & medical manufacturer
of gray-market diversion, quantified in 3 years of channel data
Unauthorized product had climbed to 12% of direct purchases, 74% of one flagship line, with rebate claims exceeding actual purchases by ~$200K a year. Lot-level custody proves the diversion to the lot, so the recovery is enforceable, not argued.
Med-surg distributor · working capital
on the GLaaS™ platform · payback in 1.4 months
Six days of border dwell removed by the green lane freed $1.2M of trapped cash, equal to $30M of new sales. With shrinkage recovered and inventory velocity gained: $1.26M recurring benefit per year and $1.8M released from the balance sheet.
Worked case, start to finish
Operating results
Financial recovery is the outcome. These are the operating measures that shift ahead of it, the leading indicators a supply-chain organization already reports, and the ones an Integrity Score moves.
Green-lane release on a provable custody record. Dwell days come straight off the cash conversion cycle.
Exception-based targeting replaces inspection-by-default, so scrutiny concentrates on the finite set of anomalies.
The compensating control that makes a low exam rate defensible to a customs authority.
Recalls become surgical instead of full write-offs, and diversion claims are proven rather than argued.
Figures are drawn from representative engagements and are not audited findings or guarantees of future performance.
Seal & custody results
You can see a broken seal. You cannot see a broken chain, unless every handover is recorded. This is the physical layer SIMS actually deploys, and what it delivers once it is on the lane.
The seal
A double-locking high-security cable seal. Two independent locks mean it cannot be removed and reused without leaving evidence, the failure mode that makes a single-lock seal worthless in a dispute.
The custody record
Every handover becomes a QR-confirmed transfer of responsibility, GPS-tracked on the driver’s own phone. No extra hardware to buy, install, or maintain, which is why it scales to a whole lane instead of a pilot.
What it delivered at national scale
Drawn from the Southern Africa Superior Custodial Control pilot and a five-port national GLaaS™ green-lane program. Figures are representative engagement results, not audited findings or guarantees.
Heritage & Doctrine
We came to security through supply chain economics, not enforcement.
Primary-source proof
A 2008 letter from U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirms that SIMS designed, delivered, and evaluated supply-chain security training for Supply Chain Security Specialists from the inception of C-TPAT.
The record matters because it is verifiable: SIMS did not arrive after the standard was mature. The firm helped translate the program into training that officers could use to assess security profiles and conduct site validations worldwide.
Read the letterHow this company came about
Five chapters, and the last one is the only one that is actually about us.
2001 · Hampton, Virginia
SIMS came out of the Logistics Modeling Center, a group doing stochastic modeling and supply chain analysis for the United States military, much of it on the Joint Strike Fighter program. The work was unglamorous and mathematical: figure out what a system will actually do, as opposed to what the plan says it will do. That question never changed. Only the cargo did.
September 2001
After the attacks, inspection tightened at more than three hundred U.S. ports of entry. The economic damage arrived within days and from a direction nobody had modeled: automobile plants in Michigan began shutting down. Not for want of demand, for want of imported parts a just-in-time system had assumed would always show up.
A modern supply chain is a tightly wound mechanism. Security imposed without regard for how it runs can cost as much as the threat it was meant to address.
The argument in Washington
The obvious move was to mandate physical security on the trade. SIMS argued the opposite: an unfunded mandate would be resisted, quietly, forever. Give companies a commercial reason, faster clearance, fewer exams, and they will build the controls themselves and pay for it out of the savings. That argument is the commercial logic C-TPAT was built on. SIMS trained the original twenty validators in 2001 and went on to design, deliver and evaluate CBP’s Supply Chain Security Specialist training for the next fourteen consecutive years.
May 2019
For its first years it was written C-TPAT. When the Minimum Security Criteria were rewritten, the first comprehensive revision in the program’s history, built with the trade through COAC after more than eight hundred public comments, the criteria were reorganized into three focus areas and twelve categories, every requirement was split into Musts and Shoulds, and the hyphen was dropped. Almost nobody noticed. Which is exactly why it is useful: how a consultant spells it tells you whether they followed the program continuously or arrived after it was finished.
Read what someone writes. C-TPAT or CTPAT. It is a two-character background check.
The part that is actually about us
Dan Garcia sees this space several years before it arrives, he has spent three decades in supply chain, customs, and cargo security, and he talks about where it is going, not where it is. Rachel Clark came from the commercial side. For eighteen months she listened to Dan describe a system that would connect the physical, financial, and commercial record into one score, and could not see how their two worlds fit together. Then one day it clicked. Everything on this site is what happened next: the vision Dan had been describing at altitude, built into something a company can actually buy on a Tuesday.
One of us sees it first. One of us ships it. Neither works without the other.
Dan Garcia trained the government's own validators. 1,500+ CBP regulatory auditors · 14 consecutive years training CBP's Supply Chain Security Specialists · engagements with SUNAT, HMRC & the WCO · 30+ years across six continents
The record
SIMS World Wide Inc. is a supply chain analysis and optimization company, through and through, with security and compliance built into the same discipline. Established in 2001, it originated as a derivative of the Logistics Modeling Center (LMCI) in Hampton, Virginia, a group that specialized in stochastic modeling and supply chain analysis for the United States military, with a particular focus on the Joint Strike Fighter program.
Following September 11, SIMS carried that defense-grade analytical discipline into the civilian world, serving private enterprise and government agencies including United States Customs and Border Protection. The founding idea never changed. A supply chain is the management of assets expressed in physical form, and security and compliance are not bolted onto that system but produced by running it well.
The full client and partnership record, enterprise and government, sits on its own page. Clients & partnerships →
Expertise & Method
Operations research applied to your material, financial, and information flows, then aligned to the financial measures your board already reads.
What we fix
Pick the outcome you are accountable for. The specialist work underneath it is listed, but the outcome is what gets measured, and what the Integrity Score moves.
Outcome 01
Inspection-by-default holds compliant freight. A trusted-trader posture built on real controls, not paperwork, converts dwell days into working capital.
Outcome 02
Product that leaves the authorized channel displaces a full-price sale and, in regulated goods, becomes a safety event. Custody has to be provable to the lot.
Outcome 03
Duty you overpaid, drawback you never filed, rebates paid on transactions that did not qualify. Measurable, documented, and mostly recoverable.
Outcome 04
Theft, tampering, insider circumvention, and cargo used to carry something it should not. An attack on the chain is a custody failure before it is a security incident.
Outcome 05
People, process, technology. The order matters. Personnel proficient in the procedures they are accountable for, and aware of the risks those controls exist to catch.
Outcome 01 · selected
Inspection-by-default holds compliant freight. A trusted-trader posture built on real controls, not paperwork, converts dwell days into working capital.
What it looks like
The specialist work
What it is worth
Dwell days convert straight into working capital. Six days removed on one program freed $1.2M of trapped cash.
What we sell to fix it
GLaaS™, inside the PlatformGreen-lane release on a provable custody record.
See what we sell →Outcome 02 · selected
Product that leaves the authorized channel displaces a full-price sale and, in regulated goods, becomes a safety event. Custody has to be provable to the lot.
What it looks like
The specialist work
What it is worth
One engagement quantified $5.5M of gray-market diversion across three years of channel data, proven to the lot, so recovery is enforceable.
What we sell to fix it
Integrity Diagnostic™Ten business days on one product family or lane.
See what we sell →Outcome 03 · selected
Duty you overpaid, drawback you never filed, rebates paid on transactions that did not qualify. Measurable, documented, and mostly recoverable.
What it looks like
The specialist work
What it is worth
Approved proof figures include $2.7M of rebate overpayment and $700K of duty refund opportunity identified, each graded by confidence class.
What we sell to fix it
Integrity Diagnostic™Validated exposure and a costed recovery plan.
See what we sell →Outcome 04 · selected
Theft, tampering, insider circumvention, and cargo used to carry something it should not. An attack on the chain is a custody failure before it is a security incident.
What it looks like
The specialist work
What it is worth
A custody record you own is the difference between arguing liability and establishing it. It is also what a green lane is granted against.
What we sell to fix it
GLaaS™, inside the PlatformLot-level custody, seals and tamper alerts on exposed lanes.
See what we sell →Outcome 05 · selected
People, process, technology. The order matters. We ensure personnel are proficient in the standard operating procedures and policies they are accountable for, and aware of the risks those controls exist to catch.
Technology last, because a control nobody understands is a control that fails quietly. We train the team that will own the program, as we trained the government’s own validators.
What it looks like
The specialist work
What it is worth
SIMS designed, delivered and evaluated the CBP Supply Chain Security Specialist training programme from the inception of CTPAT, and trained more than 1,500 CBP regulatory auditors over the fourteen consecutive years that followed. We train the team that will own it.
What we sell to fix it
SIMS Integrity Index™Recurring measurement your team runs quarterly.
See what we sell →Quantitative discipline
SIMS engineers supply chains with operations research, combining quantitative and qualitative modeling to optimize design, deployment, and efficiency, and aligning strategic financial goals with tactical strategy and operational control.
Intelligence & risk
SIMS applies advanced analytics to risk management in customs and the supply chain, resolving every exposure into three elements and mitigating each through the levers that actually move it.
The intent and capability arrayed against the supply chain, internal and external.
The gaps in partners, conveyances, processes, and data a threat can exploit.
The material, financial, and reputational cost when an exposure is realized.
The engagements behind these outcomes
Six core offers carry the work: trusted-trader programs, customs compliance and duty performance, cargo integrity, sovereign modernization, operating design, and technology and data.
Global Proof ◆ Proven on six continents
Letters of commendation from two national authorities. Elements of our work written into law.
Proof point
A national authority needed to prove cargo integrity end to end without inspecting everything, the trade-off that slows every corridor.
Provided critical assistance to SUNAT, Peru on the Superior Custodial Control Pilot, designing the control model and the evidence chain behind it.
Formal recognition from the national authority, with elements of the work incorporated into Peruvian law.
Enterprise proof
The quantified enterprise work, diversion measured from a client’s own distributor tracings and the duty recovered from their own entries, is reported with its figures on the Proof page.
Developed CBP training programs and trained more than 1,500 CBP regulatory auditors. Fourteen consecutive years delivering and evaluating Supply Chain Security Specialist training, from the inception of CTPAT.
Critical assistance to SUNAT in the Superior Custodial Control Pilot. Formal recognition from the national authority, with elements of the work incorporated into Peruvian law.
Selected to design, manage, and execute one of the first AEO/OEA and cargo-security pilots of its kind in Southern Africa (2024), supported by the Government of Sweden.
Conference moderator at the WCO IT Conference (2023), with high-profile press engagement on customs modernization.
Engagements spanning Mexican Customs and HMRC, extending the trusted-trader model across mutual-recognition partners.
Continuous featured speaker at the WCO IT Conference from 2018 through 2026 and the WCO AEO/OEA Global Conference.
Accolades & recognition
Who We Serve
Every sector faces the same core problems, we solve them the same way. Start with either dropdown.
Start here to narrow to your vertical's specific challenges.
Then pick your primary business driver, margin, speed, risk, or growth.
{{ matchedDescription }}
Or browse who we serve
On the paying side of every broken chain, absorbing tariff pass-through, gray-market risk, under-collected rebates, and consignment shrinkage while budgeting 2.4-2.8% supply chain inflation.
Medical, pharmaceutical, and controlled goods, where diverted or counterfeit product drains revenue and can reach the patient.
Landed cost and clearance speed under pressure, with a compliance posture that has to survive scrutiny.
Conveyance security and validation readiness across a network you do not fully own.
Facilitation and control at once, a corridor that proves integrity without inspecting everything.
Every vertical that moves regulated goods
SIMS serves clients across virtually every vertical. Representative industries include, and are not limited to:
SIMS Integrity Index™ ◆ How it works
The engine behind the score, and the five dimensions it resolves into. Every finding traces back to a record you already keep.
The integrity engine
The score is the executive output. The value sits underneath it, establishing expected behavior, comparing actual behavior, explaining the exception, and assigning the next action.
What should happen
Authorized channel, party, market, price, timing, and destination, built from contracts and master data, never inferred from behavior.
What did happen
Observed records reassembled into one coherent pathway, bill-to, sold-to, ship-to, tracings, and economics, lag-aligned.
Where they differ
A variance becomes an exception only when it crosses a configured materiality, authorization, or confidence rule.
What proves it
Source records, linked entities, and exception logic. No score or dollar exists without a path back to the records that made it.
What it means
Three graded classes: verified financial impact, modeled economic exposure, recoverable opportunity. Never conflated.
What to do
A named owner, a status, and the next investigative step, not a recommendation deck.
The radar chart is a visualization. The expected-versus-actual engine is the product. Enterprise chains rarely lack data, they hold ERP, distributor, customs, pricing, rebate, shipment, and custody records that each look fine and collectively contradict one another. The discrepancy is the signal.
The five dimensions
Every engagement scores the same five dimensions. Each answers one separate integrity question, carries a default weight, and has a named owner inside your business. Weights and thresholds are configured per engagement.
Did the product move through the authorized commercial channel, party, market, price, contract?
Owner: commercial + compliance
Did the economics occur as intended, and what value is still recoverable?
Owner: finance
Can the actual journey be reconstructed into one coherent, defensible story?
Owner: supply chain
Did the cross-border transaction use the correct parties, rules, and records, and can you prove it?
Owner: trade compliance
Did authorized people maintain physical control at every handoff, and can SIMS prove it?
Owner: security + logistics
The canonical distinction. Channel is the authorized commercial path. Revenue is correct economics and recovery. Trace is actual path reconstruction. Trade is compliant cross-border execution. Custody is physical control and evidence.
Five questions and a free score, or thirty minutes on your exposure. The Index and GLaaS™ are in architecture and active development.
SIMS Integrity Index™ ◆ What it finds
Every threat leaves a trace in one or more of the three flows. Naming which dimension catches it turns an alert into a recovery path with an owner.
What the Index finds
Every threat leaves a trace in one or more of the three flows. Naming which dimension catches it is what turns an alert into a recovery path with an owner.
Product bought cheap in a low-price market and resold into a high-price market outside the authorized channel.
Channel · Trace · Revenue
What the Index drives: price-gap table by market, distributor reconciliation, contract and territory amendments, MAP enforcement, re-import screening against entry data.
Product redirected from its authorized destination by a partner who resells elsewhere, by tampering in transit, or by theft.
Channel · Custody · Trace
What the Index drives: authorized-versus-actual pathway comparison, seal and custody evidence, carrier rules of the game, end-use verification.
Product in the market with no verified pathway from the manufacturer, indistinguishable to the buyer from genuine.
Trace · Custody · Channel
What the Index drives: lot genealogy from origin to ship-to, marketplace monitoring, unit-of-measure and packaging controls, custody bookends at loading and opening.
Rebates, fees and commissions paid on volume the manufacturer never sold, or on inflated trace values.
Revenue · Trace
What the Index drives: tracings-to-billings reconciliation, rebate eligibility validation, duplicate claim detection, fee-basis correction.
A trusted insider or licensee buys direct from the manufacturer’s suppliers, or orders with no intent to pay.
Channel · Revenue · Information flow
What the Index drives: pattern-library screening of receivables, disbursements and information access, with evidence custody built to survive dispute.
Wrong importer of record, misclassification, wrong origin, overpaid or underpaid duty, unscreened parties, undocumented brokers.
Trade
What the Index drives: IOR audit against the entry summary, classification and origin scrub, prior disclosure where warranted, duty refund and drawback, broker harmonization.
Five questions and a free score, or thirty minutes on your exposure. The Index and GLaaS™ are in architecture and active development.
SIMS Integrity Index™ ◆ How we engage
Channel is always the first wedge. Nothing else can be assessed until the authorized channel is established.
How we engage
Channel is always the first wedge. Nothing else can be assessed until the authorized channel is established.
01
Thirty days on a bounded data ask: 24 months of distributor tracings or delivery confirmations, customs entry records, internal sales by SKU, pricing by market. No new instrumentation. You receive the five scores, the headline exposure figures and a prioritized recovery ledger.
02
Revenue, Trace, Trade or Custody taken to depth on the exposures the diagnostic surfaced, each with its own deliverable set and score.
03
Duty refund and drawback claims, rebate and fee reconciliation and contractual recovery pursued on a success-fee basis where documented recovery exists. You pay a share when cash lands.
04
Quarterly rescoring, continuous marketplace and tracing monitoring, pattern-library updates and the seal program on exposed lanes, so the score is a milestone inside an ongoing program rather than a one-time report.
Who we ask, and for what
Because the Index is global, the engagement runs with the global corporate team rather than a single market. Financial data comes first, from the CFO or the delegate who owns revenue and margin; then commercial data; then trade and logistics data from the teams holding entry records and shipment files. ERP extracts, EDI tracings, spreadsheets and broker reports are all expected.
Five questions and a free score, or thirty minutes on your exposure. The Index and GLaaS™ are in architecture and active development.
SIMS Integrity Index™ ◆ Evidence
Before the Channel dimension was offered commercially it was run as a controlled exercise, with the failures planted and held sealed until after the run.
Worked example · Channel Integrity
Before the Channel dimension was offered commercially, it was run as a controlled exercise: a reference dataset of four SKUs across six monthly periods, with a small number of channel failures deliberately planted and held in a sealed key until after the run. What follows is that exercise, reported the way a client engagement is reported.
INPUT 01
Who is allowed to sell what, where, and at what price. The expected state of the channel, taken from your own contracts.
INPUT 02
What you shipped and invoiced, by SKU and period, the volume the channel should be able to account for.
INPUT 03
What your distributors report selling downstream: entity, destination, units, price. The actual state of the channel.
How a finding becomes a score
Every deviation between the authorized state and the reported state is classified on three axes, and the dimension score is reduced accordingly. Coverage is checked first: where the tracing record is too thin to support a conclusion, the dimension is reported as insufficient rather than scored well.
How much economic and regulatory damage the deviation can do.
One-off, repeated, or systemic, a pattern across periods weighs more than an incident.
Whether the control held, was bypassed, or never existed.
Point values, factors, and thresholds are fixed in the engineering specification and held under NDA, a client sees the parameters that apply to their engagement.
What the run surfaced
A downstream buyer appears in the tracing file that does not exist in the authorized state, and the volume traced in that period exceeds what was shipped by roughly a quarter, product entering the channel from somewhere other than you.
Entity · Trace excess
Invoiced unit price sits materially below the authorized price for three consecutive periods. One month is an exception; three is a policy operating outside the contract, and the margin difference is recoverable.
Price · Revenue · Systemic
The ship-to geography falls outside the authorized territory for that SKU, the classic first signature of diversion, visible in the distributor’s own reporting.
Geography · Diversion
An unauthorized entity, an unauthorized destination, volume above what was shipped, and a price below the authorized floor, all in the same month. Stacked failures are what the score is built to escalate, because they indicate a control that is absent rather than bypassed.
Entity · Geography · Price · Trace, critical
Every planted scenario surfaced in the period it was planted, in the detection class the key specified. That is the point of the exercise: not that anomalies exist, but that the finite set worth investigating can be named before anyone opens an account review. Ask for the technical package →
Five questions and a free score, or thirty minutes on your exposure. The Index and GLaaS™ are in architecture and active development.
A SIMS World Wide product ◆ Innovation at the border
The measurement layer of the SIMS method, in active development. A free signal, a ten-day validated diagnostic, recurring enterprise measurement, and the platform that runs it. Below, what you buy, the methodology behind it, the five dimensions we score, and a live model of the instrument.
The commercial path
Start with a directional signal, prove it with your own data, then expand into recurring enterprise measurement, continuous intelligence, and recovery. Each stage earns the next.
A short directional self-assessment that identifies where exposure is likely to sit and creates the first reason to investigate.
INDICATIVE, NOT VALIDATED Take the Snapshot, free →Ten business days on one product family, one market or lane, one priority dimension, and an agreed historical period. No confidential files required to begin.
VALIDATED SCORE + BUSINESS CASE Book the Diagnostic™The five-dimension methodology that produces one 0 to 100 SIMS Integrity Score™, drillable to every exception behind it. Custody is designed to be scored from GLaaS™ seal events rather than self-assessment.
RECURRING EXECUTIVE MEASUREMENT See the methodology →The intended end state for GLaaS™: Red Flag seals on the lane, tamper alarms, green-lane release, continuous monitoring, evidence, investigation, remediation workflow, and value recovery.
OPERATIONAL INTELLIGENCE See how GLaaS™ works →“Give us one product family, one market or trade lane, and ten business days. We’ll show you where the story stops making sense, the value attached to it, and what to investigate next.”
Who this is for
Rachel Clark
Client engagement, SIMS World Wide
“If I had this as a VP of sales or an area director, the gray-market volume, the tracings that came back wrong, never being certain where the product actually went, the gap between what my sales team reported and what the business reported out, it would have been a game changer.”
Those are not four separate problems. They are one problem, records that each look fine and collectively disagree, showing up in four places. Here is which dimension catches each of them.
“There is gray-market volume out there and I cannot size it.”
Caught by Channel · 20%
“Distributor tracings come back and they do not reconcile.”
Caught by Trace · 25%
“I am not certain where the product physically ended up.”
Caught by Custody · 10%
“My team’s numbers and the numbers we report out do not match.”
Caught by Revenue · 25%
Immutability · Compliance · Resilience
Most platforms tell a manufacturer where inventory sits. The Index tells them where revenue is leaking, where control of their own product has been lost, and what can be recovered.
The product and its documents arrive as one unbroken unit. Nothing added, nothing removed, provenance proven at origin and again at destination.
Five dimensions on one engine, so a channel anomaly, a trace exception, a customs record and a seal event are read together instead of in five silos.
Evidence that cannot be argued with: lot genealogy, entry records, photographed and geolocated custody events. Trust is not scalable. Immutability is.
Why we get to define this
A methodology that scores customs and security posture is only worth what its author knows. SIMS designed, delivered and evaluated the training for CBP Supply Chain Security Specialists from the inception of CTPAT, and trained more than 1,500 CBP regulatory auditors over the fourteen consecutive years that followed, the officers who conduct the validations this Index is built to anticipate.
Read how the firm came about →A proprietary discipline ◆ Live demo
The gray market, diverted, counterfeit, and unauthorized product, drains manufacturer revenue and, in regulated goods such as medical and pharmaceutical supply, puts the end user at risk. The Integrity Index scores supply chain integrity across five weighted dimensions, turning diversion from an invisible loss into a measured, defensible number.
Set your posture on each dimension
Did the product move through the authorized commercial channel, party, market, price, contract? Owner: commercial + compliance
Did the economics occur as intended, and what value is still recoverable? Owner: finance
Do the commercial and physical records tell one coherent story? Owner: supply chain
Did the cross-border transaction use the correct parties, rules, and records, and can you prove it? Owner: trade compliance
Did authorized people maintain control at every physical handoff? Owner: security + logistics
Weighted integrity score
Weakest dimension
{{ weakAdvice }}
The score is not the value. The value is the ability to click into the exception and see what happened, why SIMS flagged it, what is affected, the financial consequence, the evidence, and who owns remediation. Weights and thresholds are configured per engagement.
Economic hierarchy
SIMS does not characterize modeled exposure as realized loss. Every figure carries its confidence class and its assumptions.
Determinable directly from validated source records.
Verified inputs plus stated assumptions or counterfactual economics, the “value at exposure.”
A plausible recovery mechanism exists, labeled validated, probable, or potential.
The method, not just the number
Every shipment has a story; SIMS determines whether the records tell the same one. Each dimension is scored on three inputs: variance from benchmark, dollar exposure identified, and quarter-over-quarter trend. Trace reconciliation works like this:
24 months of distributor tracings, stacked by SKU and period into one table.
Reported sales for the same SKUs and periods, tracings lag billings 30-45 days.
(Tracings − sales) ÷ sales, per SKU. Over 5% is flagged; over 20% is priority.
Manufacturer ship-to through distributor sold-to, to the exact custody break point.
Each gap gets a cause and a recovery path, identification is step one, not the deliverable.
Integrity Diagnostic™ · 10 business days
Give SIMS one product family or SKU population, one market or trade lane, one priority dimension, and an agreed historical period. The result is a validated starting point, not another generic assessment.
Questions
A proprietary discipline that scores supply chain integrity across five weighted dimensions, turning diversion and gray-market loss from an invisible problem into a measured, defensible number between 0 and 100.
Channel (20%), authorized vs. actual commercial pathway. Did the product stay within expected distribution?
Revenue (25%), recoverable opportunity, revenue exposure, margin exposure. What is leaking and what is recoverable?
Trace (25%), bill-to vs. ship-to visibility. Where is the product physically going versus where it is reported?
Trade (20%), cross-border compliance. IOR, classification, origin, duties, CTPAT controls operating as designed?
Custody (10%), physical control and chain of custody. Seal integrity, location history, access control, timing anomalies.
Green Lane as a Service, the solution within Custody Integrity. A lot-level chain-of-custody engine, currently in architecture and active development, that applies exception-based targeting on an immutable ledger. Clean lots move through a facilitated green lane; the finite set of custody anomalies surfaces for investigation and recovery action.
Unauthorized access, seal broken, facility accessed outside expected hours
Seal events, tamper evidence compromised or missing
Location deviations, product tracked to unexpected warehouse or location
Timing anomalies, dwell time exceeds SLA or carrier delays suggest rerouting
Physical integrity, damage, leakage, or condition change in transport
Access control, unauthorized personnel in proximity or handling log gaps
Integrity Snapshot™, free, five questions, directional. It identifies where exposure is likely to sit. Indicative, not a validated SIMS Integrity Score™.
Integrity Diagnostic™, ten business days on one product family, one market or lane, one priority dimension, and an agreed historical period. Produces a validated dimension score, priority exceptions with evidence, value at exposure and recoverability, and the business case for expansion.
SIMS Integrity Index™, the recurring five-dimension measurement producing one 0 to 100 score for the executive team.
SIMS Integrity Platform, the continuous environment: monitoring, evidence, investigation, remediation workflow, and value recovery.
No confidential files are required to begin. The Diagnostic™ runs on records you already keep, product master, internal sales or billings, distributor tracings, authorized distributor and market lists, and pricing. Scope and secure data transfer follow qualification.
It is an illustrative model of the instrument. In an engagement the weights, thresholds, evidence sources, and anomaly rules are configured to your products, channels, and controls, and the score is computed from your own data.
What we deliver
The WCO SAFE Framework places AEO/OEA inside a customs-business partnership model. Our work is making that model operate: the methodology, the controls, the evidence, and the people who run it.
01
AEO/OEA programme design and modernization, validation methodology, and mutual-recognition readiness.
◆Eligibility, benefits and tier design
◆Validation methodology and validator training
◆Mutual recognition preparation and documentation
02
Risk engines, anomaly methodology, post-clearance controls, and the metrics that show whether they work.
◆Selectivity and targeting criteria
◆Anomaly methodology and scoring
◆Post-clearance audit design and performance metrics
03
Corridor design, e-seal and tracking integration, and connecting Port Community Systems and National Single Windows with digital trade corridors.
◆Secure-corridor and green-lane pilots
◆E-seal, tracking and custody-event integration
◆PCS and single-window interoperability
04
Initiation, governance, implementation planning, stakeholder adoption, and donor-ready submissions.
◆Project governance and implementation plans
◆Stakeholder and private-sector adoption programmes
◆Financial cases and donor-ready documentation
05
The curriculum discipline behind more than 1,500 trained CBP regulatory auditors, adapted to a national programme.
◆Officer and validator development
◆Curricula, exercises and assessment
◆English and Spanish delivery
06
Continuous evidence that an authorized operator still operates the way it was authorized to. In architecture and active development.
◆Expected-versus-actual reconciliation
◆Exception ranking by severity, persistence and control condition
◆Re-validation and monitoring support
The record
Letters of commendation from the World Customs Organization, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and SUNAT Peru. Elements of the SUNAT work were incorporated into Peruvian law.
Authorization remains your decision
No consultant grants AEO/OEA status or certifies an operator. SIMS designs the programme, the validation methodology and the institutional capability behind it. Agency requirements and procedures should be rechecked for the relevant date and jurisdiction.
Clients & partnerships
SIMS works on both sides of the border: with the enterprises that move regulated goods, and with the customs administrations and multilateral bodies that govern how they move. The same method serves both, which is why a programme designed for one is credible to the other.
Clients & partnerships
SIMS works on both sides of the border: with the enterprises that move regulated goods, and with the customs administrations and multilateral bodies that govern how they move. The same method serves both, which is why a programme designed for one is credible to the other.
Enterprise clients
Disney
◆Brand protection and licensed-goods integrity
◆West coast port diversion program
Lockheed Martin
◆Stochastic supply chain analysis
◆Defense supply chain and controlled goods
Cemex
◆CTPAT and rail security
◆Bulk materials, cross-border haul and custody
Currey & Company
◆Import compliance and landed cost
◆Supply chain security
◆Policy and procedure optimization
◆Foreign vendor security analysis and training
POST Luxembourg
◆E-commerce supply chain analysis
◆Facilitated AEO/OEA certification
Ecolab
◆EU site security assessments
◆AEO/OEA and CTPAT readiness
Ruan
◆CTPAT analysis and implementation across seven international sites
◆SOP development and nomenclature harmonization
◆Conveyance security and custody
GlaxoSmithKline
◆Pharmaceutical channel and custody integrity
◆Global regulatory compliance risk analysis and optimization
KCSM
◆Cross-border rail & conveyance security
Polaris
◆Factory site security assessments in the United States, Japan and Mexico
◆Policy and procedure development
◆CTPAT certification and validation
Government & multilateral partnerships
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
◆SCSS (Supply Chain Security Specialist) and auditor training
◆Financial impact of supply chain security
World Customs Organization
◆Speaker and moderator
◆Regional training across the globe
◆AEO/OEA supply chain pilot, design and execution
SUNAT · Peru
◆Supply chain security
◆Emerging technology advisor
◆System interoperability expert
HM Revenue & Customs
◆AEO/OEA programme advisory, United Kingdom
The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency
◆AEO/OEA cargo-security pilot, Southern Africa
Customs administrations engaged
Administrations of the Americas and the Caribbean represented in SIMS training and cargo traceability programmes delivered with the World Customs Organization and its Regional Training Centre.
Argentina
Dirección General de Aduanas
Bolivia
Aduana Nacional de Bolivia
Brazil
Secretaria Especial da Receita Federal do Brasil
Canada
Canada Border Services Agency
Chile
Servicio Nacional de Aduanas
Colombia
Dirección de Impuestos y Aduanas Nacionales
Costa Rica
Dirección General de Aduanas
Dominican Republic
Dirección General de Aduanas
El Salvador
Dirección General de Aduanas
Guatemala
Superintendencia de Administración Tributaria, Intendencia de Aduanas
Honduras
Administración Aduanera de Honduras
Mexico
Agencia Nacional de Aduanas de México
Nicaragua
Dirección General de Servicios Aduaneros
Panama
Autoridad Nacional de Aduanas
Paraguay
Dirección Nacional de Aduanas
Peru
Superintendencia Nacional de Aduanas y de Administración Tributaria
Uruguay
Dirección Nacional de Aduanas
Engagement scope differs by client and is available on request. Marks shown are text monograms, not the organisations’ own logos, trademarks remain the property of their owners.
From trust to truth
SIMS is engineering the trade corridors of the future, where security is not inspected in at the border but proven at every step along the way. By binding the three flows of trade to a single immutable record, we transform the border from a checkpoint built on trust into a corridor built on truth.
What a corridor proves
Every event is known, integrated, and immutable, not asserted on a paper trail.
Full customs visibility on what is arriving, before it arrives.
An export is verified to be a true import, purchase order to point of delivery.
Origin, condition, and accountability of goods and data, established and preserved.
Interoperability
Connecting Port Community Systems (PCS) and National Single Windows with digital trade corridors, so a declaration, a custody event and a release decision reference the same record across systems and borders. The corridor does not replace those systems. It gives them one version of the truth to agree on.
Terminal, carrier and forwarder events bound to the custody record rather than held in a parallel log.
Declarations, permits and agency decisions reconciled against what physically moved, before release.
Evidence an administration on the other side of the lane can test, which is what makes recognition operational rather than diplomatic.
Lot-level chain of custody is the evidence layer underneath a green lane. Both are in architecture and active development.
Custody Integrity · The solution
The physical evidence layer, currently in architecture and active development. It establishes verifiable custody events and feeds Trace, Channel, and Trade intelligence, it is not the whole platform.
The stack
GLaaS™ is the physical evidence layer. It establishes verifiable custody events and feeds Trace, Channel, and Trade intelligence, but it is not the whole platform.
LXR / Duplexeal™, tamper-evident and high-security hardware matched to the use case.
GLaaS™ / STM, verifiable custody events on an immutable ledger.
SIMS Integrity Platform, expected state, actual state, reconciliation, exceptions, evidence.
SIMS Integrity Index™, one 0 to 100 score, drillable to every exception.
Action and recovery, a named owner, a status, and the money back.
Live demo · exception-based targeting
A lot-level chain-of-custody engine, in architecture and active development. GLaaS is the evidence layer that recovers margin exposure, revenue leakage, and recoverable tariff opportunity by proving custody chain and lot traceability. Exception-based targeting on an immutable ledger surfaces the finite set of anomalies that opened exposure windows, so clean lots move to green lane while recoverable opportunities get captured.
Exposure from diversion and gray-market leakage turned into documented, recoverable fact
border dwell removed by a green lane comes straight off DIO and the cash conversion cycle
loss proven, claims reconciled to sealed deliveries, recalls surgical instead of full write-offs
Corridor simulator
Immutable lot ledger
Origin → seal → gateway → border → delivery. A dashed span is the break point.
Congruent trade is facilitated, dynamic trade is validated on the reason for its variance, incongruent trade is escalated for proportionate intervention. Ten of {{ lotCount }} lots shown.
Why these lots were targeted
From · Traditional SCM
To · Immutable SCM
Custody anomalies targeted by exception
Tamper evidence compromised, unauthorized facility access, broken seals.
Product tracked to unexpected warehouse, routing change, or unplanned stop.
Dwell time exceeds SLA, carrier delays suggest rerouting or diversion.
Damage, leakage, condition change, or quantity discrepancy in transport.
Where GLaaS™ fits
The seal record is what makes Custody Integrity evidence rather than assertion, and it feeds the same engine that scores Channel, Revenue, Trace and Trade. In architecture and active development.
Insights · Healthcare
By Dan Garcia, Director & Senior Analyst · August 2026
Health systems are budgeting for supply chain inflation between 2.4% and 2.8% through mid-2027, Vizient's Winter 2026 outlook raised the forecast to 2.78%, with tariffs, freight, imported products, capital equipment, and surgical supplies named among the drivers. The number most systems are not budgeting for is the one hiding inside it: how much of the "inflation" they are asked to absorb is unaudited pass-through and recoverable leakage.
Tariff pass-through is a claim, not a fact. When a supplier raises prices citing tariffs, that increase embeds assumptions: the HTS classification, the declared valuation, the country of origin, the duty program eligibility. Each of those is testable. Misclassification repeats on every entry; first-sale valuation and duty recovery programs routinely offset a meaningful share of claimed tariff cost. A health system negotiating a pass-through without auditing these is accepting the supplier's homework unchecked.
Inflation is uncontrollable. Leakage is not. While procurement fights for basis points on price, whole percentage points leak through channels: gray-market product entering at "discount" prices that void warranty and rebate integrity, rebate claims exceeding actual purchases, shrinkage and dwell in distribution. In one engagement, a global health and medical manufacturer's channel data showed unauthorized product at 12% of direct purchases and rebate over-claims of roughly $200,000 a year, $5.5 million of diversion quantified across three years. That money doesn't show up in an inflation forecast. It shows up when movement is reconciled against reported sales.
Working capital is the third lever. For a med-surg distributor, removing six days of border dwell freed $1.8 million in trapped cash and produced $1.26 million in recurring annual benefit, an 8.4× return on the custody program that produced it. Cash cycle is a supply chain property, not a treasury one.
The discipline: score it before you budget it. The SIMS Integrity Index measures a supply chain across five weighted dimensions, Channel, Revenue, Trace, Trade, Custody, and converts the gaps into a dollar exposure. For a health system, that turns the budget conversation from "how do we absorb 2.78%?" into "what is our recoverable number?" One is a cost of doing business. The other is a project with an ROI.
Find your recoverable number, the free Integrity Snapshot™, hospital/health-system preset included.
Score your supply chain →Sources: Vizient Winter 2026 Spend Management Outlook (2.78% forecast, July 2026-June 2027); industry reporting on health-system supply chain inflation baselines. Engagement figures from anonymized SIMS client work.
← All InsightsInsights
Short reads for supply chain, compliance, and trade leaders.
Healthcare · New
Health systems are budgeting for the Vizient forecast. The number they aren't budgeting for is the recoverable leakage hiding inside it, tariff pass-through, gray-market diversion, rebate over-claims, and trapped working capital.
Read →{{ topicKicker }}
{{ topicLede }}
{{ topicIntro }}
{{ pt.d }}
Why SIMS
{{ topicProof }}
The Work of the Moment
Trade enforcement has entered a more demanding era. Tariffs, forced-labor rules, and an expanding prosecution posture increasingly converge on the importer of record, and SIMS turns each pressure into a defensible compliance strategy.
Shifting tariff schedules, safeguard and antidumping duties, and exemption regimes. SIMS monitors the landscape and structures lawful, defensible mitigation.
Heightened enforcement of importer-of-record accuracy, bonding, and trusted-trader filing. SIMS readies importers and brokers for the standard.
Expanding civil and criminal liability reaching down the supply chain. SIMS builds the records and internal controls that withstand scrutiny.
Where duties were overpaid, SIMS prepares the declarations and entry audits that recover them through the lawful refund and protest channels.
Verified country of origin is a frontline test. SIMS binds material, financial, and information flows so origin claims hold up under scrutiny.
Forced-labor import bans demand traceability several tiers deep. SIMS maps partners and evidences admissibility across the chain.
SIMS does not meet the moment by trading in alarm. It meets it with quantitative discipline, financial fluency, and the doctrinal memory of a program it helped to shape, redesigning the operation so that compliance becomes, once again, the byproduct of running it well.
Questions
If yours is not here, ask it directly. You will get a practitioner, not a sales queue.
{{ f.a }}
Next step
Thirty minutes on your exposure, or five questions and a free score first. Either way you see the point before anyone asks you for a budget.
Not sure where to start?
The Integrity Platform runs from a free five-question snapshot through to recurring measurement. Pick the step that fits before you book.
Leadership
Client engagement
Commercial leadership in medical and wound care, including roles at Essity and Mölnlycke, and a $219M US commercial P&L as vice president of US medical. She identified and quantified the recovery mechanisms behind the Index from a manufacturer’s own data. Your first call, your scoping, and your follow-up all run through her, not a sales queue.
LinkedIn profile →
Supply chain & security practice
Three decades in supply chain, customs, and cargo security, spanning CTPAT, AEO/OEA program design, and validator training worldwide. Most recently the opening speaker at the SUNAT and WCO Regional Training Centre Cargo Traceability seminar for customs administrations of the Americas and the Caribbean.
LinkedIn profile →An invitation to begin
Every engagement begins with a conversation. We would be glad to learn your constraints, understand your objective function, and engineer the outcome that meets your goals. Tell us what you are optimizing for, and we will show you how security, compliance, and performance are delivered as a single result.
Book directly
Thirty minutes with the SIMS trade team. No form, no gatekeeping, you will be talking to someone who has done the work.
Get a 30-minute read on your exposureWhere your goods move, who touches them, and where cost and clearance friction is showing up.
A read on which Integrity Index dimensions are exposed, and which are worth measuring first.
A scoped assessment against the Index, and a view of whether GLaaS™ applies to your custody chain.
Corporate profile 2026
Origins in stochastic modeling for the United States defense community, the architecture of trade integrity, the international record, and the instruments now in build. Available in English, Spanish and Arabic.
