The people who run Foreign-Trade Zones are used to complexity. What is new in 2026 is the pace of it. Tariff schedules revised multiple times in a single month. CBP enforcement at levels not seen in years. Compliance teams already stretched, managing volume that is growing faster than headcount can follow.

The NAFTZ Annual Conference, October 18 through 21 at Loews Coronado Bay Resort in Coronado, California, is where that conversation happens in person — across four days of sessions, roundtables, and floor conversations that get into the operational detail most trade events never reach.

QAD will be at Booth 3. Here is what to expect.

Conference at a Glance

What the 2026 Agenda Tells Us

The financial case for Foreign-Trade Zones has not weakened. The latest FTZ Board annual report documents $964 billion of merchandise received into U.S. zones, 381 active production operations, and more than 543,000 people employed across the program.¹ The opportunity is real.

What has changed is the environment in which that opportunity has to be captured. The U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule reached Revision 17 in August 2026, with multiple revisions across July and August alone.² The value of global trade affected by new tariffs jumped from $611 billion to $2.64 trillion in a single year — a 4.3x increase.³ CBP assessed more than $2.1 billion in commercial trade penalties in FY2026.⁴

The 2026 NAFTZ program reflects this directly. A few themes worth noting from the agenda:

CBP enforcement is front and center. Tuesday opens with U.S. FTZ Program Enforcement Updates from CBP. Additional sessions cover CF-28 and CF-29 risk assessment, periodic requirements and inspections, and what the new customs executive order means for zones.

Activation and operational readiness run throughout the program. Monday covers expansions, bonded facilities, and activation. Tuesday offers an inventory handling boot camp for manufacturing environments. Wednesday includes UAT testing for FTZ software and a session on qualifying prospective operators.

Tariff policy intersects with FTZ operations at every level. Sessions on Trump’s Maritime Policy, duty drawback, FTZ and FTA balance, and the implications of the new executive order speak directly to the financial planning questions every FTZ leadership team is working through right now.

Joshua Guy on Stage — Tuesday, October 20

Activation is one of the most consequential transitions an FTZ program goes through. Getting it right requires preparation across compliance, operations, IT, and finance. Getting it wrong creates CBP exposure, delays, and rework that is expensive to unwind. Joshua Guy covers the things that actually determine the outcome — implementation speed, data readiness, process alignment, system dependencies, common failure points, and ongoing audit readiness after activation. If your program is approaching activation or planning to expand, this session is worth your Tuesday morning.

What QAD Is Bringing to Booth 3

FTZ Management is where this community knows QAD. At NAFTZ 2026, we are also introducing the broader platform it now sits within.

QAD Global Trade Compliance is a connected trade compliance platform built for manufacturers and distributors. It brings together three core capabilities:

• FTZ Management reconciles zone books against real inventory movement, automates tariff updates across every zone, and keeps audit documentation current in real time. Not against a spreadsheet updated on Friday.
• Continuous Restricted Party Screening screens every transaction and every counterparty continuously against denied party lists. Every match arrives with the order, the PO, and the product attached — so your team can act immediately rather than investigate.
• Trade Compliance Champion is a set of AI agents that automate the most time-intensive compliance work, with a human reviewing and approving every output before it moves. Two agents are live now.
  • Product Classification reads product data and returns HTS, ECCN, and Schedule B recommendations in under a minute, with a confidence score and full rationale attached. A process that traditionally required roughly 110 minutes per part⁵ now returns in sub-minute time. Results vary based on review workflow and classification complexity, but the directional shift is real: from hours to minutes, per part, per decision.
  • Document Automation reads commercial invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, and certificates of origin as they arrive, extracts and validates the data, and routes it directly into the compliance workflow. Work that previously took roughly 15 minutes per bill of lading is now completed in under a minute per document.⁵

Every output includes its reasoning and a complete audit trail. No recommendation is finalized by the system alone. The compliance professional reviews it, sees the rationale, and makes the call.

As Joshua Guy put it at launch: “It’s the difference between a team that reacts to regulatory change and one that gets ahead of it.”

Find Us at Booth 3

QAD will be at Booth 3 throughout the conference. The exhibit hall opens Monday, October 19 at 7:30 a.m. and runs through Wednesday morning. If you want to see FTZ Management, Continuous Restricted Party Screening, and Trade Compliance Champion in action — or have a conversation about where your program stands today — come find us.

Learn more about QAD Global Trade Compliance at qad.com/solutions/global-trade-compliance.

See you in Coronado.

Sources

1. Foreign-Trade Zones Board — Annual Report to Congress. trade.gov/foreign-trade-zones-board
2. U.S. International Trade Commission — HTS Archive, Revision 17, August 2026. www.trade.gov
3. World Trade Organization — Annual Trade Monitoring Report, December 2025. wto.org
4. U.S. Department of Justice — Trade Enforcement Update, July 2026. justice.gov
5. Time-savings figures based on traditional manual-method benchmarks. Source: Thomson Reuters.