CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Adafruit

Integrated Denied Party Screening

Supports International Growth

Adafruit Industries designs, manufacturers, and sells educational electronics for everyone from robot enthusiasts to military personnel around the world. In order to keep its fast-growing export market vibrant, the New York-based company integrated Descartes Visual Compliance™ Restricted Party Screening solutions with its custom-built Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to screen its more than 20,000 monthly online orders, and help ensure it was not doing business with denied parties.

“It’s easier for us now. If there’s a hit, it (the Descartes Visual Compliance screening solution) gives us more information directly on the order page, so that we can look at it and make an informed decision based on what we are seeing. The customer never knows what’s going on. It’s like an insurance policy.”
Philip Torrone, Chief Executive Officer, Adafruit Industries

Company Profile

• Company: Adafruit Industries, LLC
• Industry: Educational Electronics
• Solutions: Descartes Visual Compliance™ Restricted Party Screening

About the Client

Adafruit Industries, LLC was founded in 2005, with the aim of being the best online resource for learning electronics, and to produce the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Its offerings include only tools, equipment, electronics, and accessories that are personally selected, tested, and approved by their founder.

Quick Overview

Challenge

A Time-Consuming Manual Export Compliance Process
With thousands of orders coming in from around the world every day, and needing to manage 2,000 international resellers, Adafruit Industries required a restricted party screening solution that saved time, was reliable, and could be up-and-running quickly. The laborious process of manual screening—coupled with having to keep pace with daily updates to denied parties lists—led the company to think that there had to be a better way.

Founder Limor Fried (the first female engineer to be featured on the cover of WIRED magazine) and CEO Philip Torrone were committed to providing the best e-commerce experience to customers while fulfilling their export compliance responsibilities. They chose to simplify the screening process through automation and wanted to get started right away.

Solution

Seamless Implementation of Integrated Screening
Adafruit’s quest for a time-saving and reliable screening solution didn’t take long. They looked at other vendors, but Fried and Torrone were impressed with the speed and accuracy demonstrated by Descartes Visual Compliance, plus the reassurance they received that implementation would be fast and uncomplicated. They were also aware of other prominent e-commerce businesses using Descartes Visual Compliance software solutions to meet their screening needs and had noticed them referenced on U.S. Government websites. Knowing that Descartes Visual Compliance had the credentials to deliver what they needed is what kept it “top of the list” in their search.

Adafruit chose to simplify its restricted party screening process through automation and wanted to get started right away. They chose Descartes Visual Compliance to take on the task of providing a fast integration implementation.
Descartes’ solution integrated seamlessly into Adafruit’s custom in-house ERP system in just a couple of days. Every time an order is processed online, the entity is screened. Adafruit can be certain that they are not shipping to debarred parties, and by automating the process, they no longer have to allocate resources to manual screening or to maintaining the vast collection of ever-changing government watch lists. They also have peace of mind knowing that the Descartes Visual Compliance Application Programming Interface (API) service automatically records each transaction into an audit record, so that, should Adafruit ever need to prove its compliance, they will be able to easily access detailed records of their screening activities.

Time Savings with Automation

“We had to ask ourselves, how can we continue to have best practices and make sure we’re not shipping the wrong way?” Torrone explains. “As a modern company, using an API is our natural way of doing things.” While Adafruit’s searches typically reveal eligible customers, they no longer worry about undesirable parties slipping through the cracks.
“Implementation was so fast. It took just a few days.”

Reach More Customers

Results:
Built-in Audit Trail
Descartes Visual Compliance integration with Adafruit’s in-house ERP system was fast and straightforward, allowing the company to strengthen its compliance sooner than later and with minimal IT resources.