Enterprise-Wide Denied Party Screening With Descartes Visual Compliance

Operating in the defence and aerospace industries, Meggitt PLC relies on robust export compliance practices. To this end, Meggitt deployed Descartes Visual Compliance™ to simplify and accelerate denied party screening to mitigate risk. Seamless integration with multiple business systems, including customer relationship management (CRM) and SAP global trade services (GTS), ensures consistent, cost-effective compliance in a single platform, saving time and resources while delivering rapid ROI.

"Automated screening with Descartes Visual Compliance gives us a high level of confidence regarding compliance and due diligence, both on a day-to-day basis and when entering new markets or signing up new partners. And by integrating the Descartes system into our other business processes, we not only reduced the burden on our organization to do these processes manually, but we've improved compliance."

Jonathan Priganc, Director, Business Systems - Commercial & Corporate Affairs, Meggitt PLC

Known for its specialized extreme environment engineering, Meggitt PLC is a world leader in aerospace, defense, and energy. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Meggitt operates in North America, Europe, and Asia and employs more than 9,000 people at over 40 manufacturing facilities and regional offices worldwide.

Meggitt faces a unique set of export compliance challenges as a leading global supplier to the aerospace and defense industries. Since the company must continuously screen against hundreds of government watch lists, manual screening was not feasible. In addition to denied party screening, Meggitt needed to screen for beneficial ownership research to meet OFAC regulations and was looking to upgrade its visitor screening process. The company required an automated, easy-to-use screening solution that would eliminate inefficient manual practices, integrate seamlessly with disparate business systems to boost productivity, and ensure strict export compliance in the face of new challenges and expanding markets.

As part of its compliance strategy, Meggitt turned to Descartes Visual Compliance to automate its denied party screening practice, increasing compliance productivity while mitigating risk. Working continuously behind the scenes without human intervention, the Descartes solutionprovides reliable, proactive screening with real-time alerts for immediate intervention.

“Descartes Visual Compliance automatically screens every customer, vendor, partner, and bank at the transaction level against the full spectrum of government watch lists. If there are any hits, the system immediately halts any export transactions,” explains Jonathan Priganc, Director of Business Systems for Commercial and Corporate Affairs at Meggitt.

To comply with OFAC regulations, Meggitt also screens for sanctioned party ownership. Prior to implementing the Descartes system, Meggitt paid law firms for research to identify the owners of its customers. Priganc notes, “By pulling the beneficial ownership feed into Descartes Visual Compliance, we’re saving time and money; one of our Switzerland sites is saving upwards of one week’s worth of an engineer’s time every year. Plus, with strong confidence in automated screening, we’re able to open up potential business opportunities that wouldn’t be available if we had to undertake the onerous task of manual screening.”

Descartes Visual Compliance is designed to integrate easily with disparate business platforms without modifying existing workflows or devoting additional resources. Meggitt integrated the Descartes system with its CRM, ERP, beneficial ownership research, and enterprise visitor management solutions.

“CRM integration saves our sales team time and effort by screening prospects prior to going down the path of engaging with them,” expands Prignac. “And from the minute an order is taken, we know if we’re able to ship that order. The system will continue to screen right up to the point of delivery so, even if the delivery date is eight months away, we can still be confident in our ability to compliantly make sales to those customers. "

Priganc adds, “We also recently deployed a global visitor management solution that plugged into the Descartes system right out of the box, enabling us to reduce our visitor screening process from approximately 30 minutes per visitor down to about five minutes. It’s a huge win for us.”

1. Risk Mitigation
   Using the automated Descartes solution to continuously screen for restricted party and beneficial ownership research at any point in the business workflow, Meggitt ensures export, trade, and financial compliance across all the enterprise.
2. Greater Efficiency
   With full integration into Meggitt’s various business systems, Descartes Visual Compliance enables screening to take place automatically at the point of data entry (or elsewhere in the business workflow), taking the burden off internal staff resources.
3. Cost Savings
   The cost-effective Descartes solution eliminates costly and labor-intensive manual screening processes. For example, by rolling out the turnkey visitor management system integrated with Descartes Visual Compliance, Meggitt expects to realize an annual ROI of more than US$300,000.
4. Simple Integration
   Descartes Visual Compliance easily plugs into SAP GTS and Meggitt’s CRM and visitor management software to ensure compliance across the enterprise within one centralized system.