Operational Intelligence Platform for Trade Operations

The Challenge

A mid-sized commodity trading firm in Asia-Pacific managed trade operations across multiple geographies, counterparties, and regulatory jurisdictions. Each shipment involved 15–20 documents (bills of lading, letters of credit, certificates of origin, inspection certificates, customs declarations) flowing through 4–5 systems.

The reality:

• Trade documents arrived as PDFs, scanned images, and email attachments — manually re-keyed into the trade management system
• Each shipment required data entered into the TMS, banking portal, customs system, and internal tracking spreadsheets — often by different teams
• Compliance documentation was assembled manually before audits, pulling from email archives, shared drives, and individual team members' files
• Operations managers had no single view of shipment status — they checked multiple systems and called team members
• Average document processing time per shipment was 4 hours of manual work across 3 team members

Our Approach

Phase 1 — Operational Mapping (3 weeks)

We mapped the document lifecycle for each trade type: the documents involved, the systems they touched, the manual handoffs, and the compliance requirements. We identified 47 distinct manual steps in the average shipment workflow.

Phase 2 — Architecture Design

We designed a workflow intelligence layer that connected existing systems without replacing them:

Document intelligence module — AI extraction for trade documents (bills of lading, LCs, certificates) with validation against trade management system data. Trained on the firm's actual document formats, not generic models.

Cross-system orchestration — When a document is processed, the extracted data propagates to every system that needs it: TMS, banking portal, customs declarations, internal tracking. One input, multiple outputs — with validation at each step.

Operational dashboard — Real-time view of every shipment: document status, system updates, pending actions, and exceptions. Replaced 12 separate spreadsheets that different teams maintained independently.

Compliance archive — Every document, every extraction, every validation, every approval — logged and indexed automatically. Audit preparation becomes a query, not a project.

Phase 3 — Deployment (14 weeks)

Rolled out by trade type, starting with the highest-volume commodity. Each phase included document model training, integration testing with live data, and team training.

The Technology

• Document extraction models trained on trade-specific document types
• API integrations with trade management system, banking platforms, and customs portals
• Event-driven workflow orchestration for cross-system data propagation
• Operational dashboard built on real-time event data

The Result

After full deployment:

• Document processing time dropped from 4 hours to 25 minutes per shipment
• Data re-entry across systems reduced by 90%
• Operations managers had real-time shipment visibility for the first time
• Compliance documentation for a full audit was assembled in 2 days instead of 2 weeks
• The operations team handled 40% more trade volume without adding headcount