Increasing Export Compliance Productivity by 75% with Descartes Visual Compliance

Compliance with global trade regulations has long been critical to success for Argosy International, a manufacturer of specialty chemical products for diverse markets with a concentration on aerospace, automotive, tooling, and prototyping for industry and electronics. By automating export compliance, including denied party screening, with Descartes Visual Compliance™, Argosy has been able to significantly reduce risk and divert compliance resources to higher value initiatives as the company has continued to grow and diversify worldwide.

“By automating denied party screening and determining appropriate export license requirements with Descartes’ intuitive and easy-to-use solution, Argosy has realized a 75% productivity gain in our compliance practice. Descartes Visual Compliance has allowed us to focus more resources on international growth, better mitigate risk, and ensure we achieve 100% trade compliance rates.”

Amy Chen - Quality Manager & Export Compliance Officer -Argosy International

As the market leader in the Asia Pacific region with more than 15 distribution and sales facilities on four continents, New York-based Argosy prioritizes global export compliance as a vital part of its long-term strategy to grow overseas markets. Given the substantial volume of information that flows through Argosy’s global sales channels, time-consuming manual compliance processes and subjective analysis were impractical, risky, and labor-intensive. The company needed an automated, user-friendly screening solution that would eliminate inefficient manual practices, keep pace with increasing order volumes, and ensure strict export compliance as the company expanded operations worldwide.

With export compliance a continued high priority for Argosy during the pandemic, the company relied on Descartes Visual Compliance to automate denied party screening practices to ensure compliance and mitigate risk across four continents. The automated Descartes solution offers an up-to-date international database of hundreds of watch lists and provides a full range of audit recording and due diligence capabilities that automatically record screening details.

“Full compliance with export laws gives us a competitive advantage, reassuring our customers that that they can safely conduct business with us,” said Amy Chen, Argosy’s quality manager and export compliance officer. “With the confidence that we’re screening our trade chain partner database against denied parties lists to achieve 100% compliance, and knowing that we’re able to determine export license requirements with Descartes Visual Compliance, we can reallocate existing resources to other priority areas of the business, especially to delivering quality products and services to our customers.”

The dynamic screening capabilities of Descartes Visual Compliance ensure Argosy’s compliance practice is consistently up to date by automatically re-screening its customers, vendors, and other business partners whenever the government makes changes to denied or restricted parties lists. “Once a name enters the system, it stays there to be continually rescreened in the background, and I’m automatically alerted if there is a positive match,” noted Chen.

She added that Argosy now spends 75% less time on compliance practices, compared with how the company previously undertook this effort. “By leveraging technology to automate the compliance process, we’ve been able to streamline our workflows and boost productivity while increasing accuracy, optimizing decision-making, and lowering our exposure to trade-related risks.” Results

75% Productivity Gain: By automating screening of its trade chain partner database against denied party lists and determining appropriate export license requirements with the user-friendly Descartes solution, Argosy realized a 75% productivity gain in its compliance practice.

Elevated Compliance: By removing human error from the equation, Descartes’ automated denied party screening and ECCN classification tools help Argosy dramatically reduce risk with 100% export compliance rates.

Robust Due Diligence: Descartes Visual Compliance offers easy-to-understand results, accurate recordkeeping, and audit-ready capabilities, which enable Argosy to demonstrate due diligence quickly with confidence.

Competitive Advantage: Part of a long-term strategy to differentiate Argosy by prioritizing export compliance and due diligence, the Descartes solution has enabled the company to allocate more resources to international growth while mitigating risk.