Pincvision Responds Faster to Changes in Trade Compliance with Progress Corticon

Every company involved in export and logistics needs to comply with international business legislation. Pincvision, a Dutch technology company that helps large multinational organizations put in place trade compliance processes in the areas of customs, environment, export documents, EU intrastat and VAT. Pincvision deploys years of experience, knowledge and manpower into intelligent IT solutions that handle trade compliance in an unambiguous and consistent manner in all countries where their customers do business. 

Pincvision must continuously keep its intelligent IT systems up to date with the new laws and regulations issued in almost all countries. The specialists at Pincvision therefore continuously monitor the legal field and pass on regulatory changes, such as the temporary reduction of VAT in Germany or ones related to the departure of England from the European Union, to the IT department.  

The IT team would process the changes directly in the software, which turned out too slow, inefficient and expensive. "We were looking for a way to implement new laws and regulations in our services more quickly," Edwin Kampshoff, CIO of Pincvision said. "Ideally, we wanted the business itself to be able to handle the process, so that we could be fast in responding to changes and no longer adapt the software.” 

Pincvision leaned on Progress® Corticon® Business Rules Management System to implement their business logic and streamline the process of updating rules. 

Compliance rules are typically embedded in the code of most software applications. With Corticon, that logic is centralized in a separate layer so that changes to these rules can be implemented without changing the code in production. Specialists and data analysts at Pincvision can offer the specific transactional data provided by the customer in the system to Corticon via a user-friendly, Excel-like frontend. Corticon then processes these large data files of thousands of trade compliance rules via the SQL Server backend in Microsoft Azure, where data harmonization, additional calculations and consolidations are automatically observed.  

A major advantage for Pincvision was that they were able to perform rules integrity checks through Corticon. Once rules were defined in the system, it checked whether they were complete. For example, if an if/else scenario was missing the system would notify experts that the rule was not complete. The check for completeness and correctness ensures that specialists never overlook important matters and that the output is watertight," Kampshoff said. 

Centralizing the business knowledge was another major win for Pincvision. Edwin Kampshoff explained, "We wanted the knowledge within the organization to no longer be exclusively held by our specialists. Previously, there was a good chance that knowledge was lost when an expert left the organization. By using Corticon, we were able to democratize their knowledge by implementing specific business rules and the automated actions associated with them into the system." In addition, it was important for Pincvision that Corticon could handle diverse data sources: Customer data often comes in different formats and Corticon integrates easily with various existing infrastructures.