Increasing Global Trade Compliance Audit Coverage at Biogen from 10% to 100% with AI-Powered Automation through Posit Connect

Challenge: Manual audits for trade compliance

Biogen’s trade compliance team is responsible for ensuring that all imported shipments adhere to country-specific regulations, which was traditionally done by manual audit process by ensuring that all documentation—such as customs declarations and shipping invoices—matched internal Biogen systems. This posed several significant difficulties:

• Non-machine readable documents: The external documents were often scanned PDFs, multi-page, and not designed for machine readability, making automated data extraction nearly impossible prior to the advent of generative AI. Jay Timmerman adds, “Before Gen AI this was not really a tractable problem.” The core challenge lay in transforming scanned PDFs into a usable table format, enabling subsequent matching and logical operations, which is precisely where AI emerged as a crucial element of the solution.
• Dispersed multi-language information: Critical data points were often scattered across numerous pages of documents, and these documents were received in various languages, complicating the manual review process.
• High human effort and error risk: The manual data entry and verification was consuming considerable human effort and leading to potential mistakes. This reactive, labor-intensive approach limited the team’s ability to engage in more strategic work.

Solution: Expediting AI Tool Deployment with Posit Connect to Transform Scanned PDFs into Structured Data

To address these challenges, the trade compliance team spearheaded a collaborative effort with the AI Capability Team with a target goal of reducing compliance audit time by 50% (cutting the 1,000 hours a year performing audits down to 500).

Using a combination of Azure OpenAI models, Streamlit, and Posit Connect the team is now able to turn a scanned PDF into structured data with Optical Character Recognition. This innovation streamlines trade compliance by transforming data generation tasks into a verification role. Leads can now focus on strategic operations and outlier analysis, overseeing the system’s output rather than generating it. 

What was once a limiting manual process, allowing audits of only 10% of customs entries, has been transformed. Through AI-powered automation enabled by Posit Connect, the team has successfully increased their audit coverage to 100%.

This unprecedented efficiency is made possible by Posit Connect, which centralizes every step of the workflow and eliminates the need to integrate disparate services, thereby improving the solution delivery speed and controlling additional service costs. 

Without Posit, Jay shares that Biogen users would need to manually deploy Streamlit apps to AWS, manage container services, handle API management, and set up logging which would require extensive knowledge of each individual service and their orchestration. Posit Connect, however, streamlines this process by offering features such as role-based access control, integrated logging, and deployment controls.

For Biogen, deploying AI solutions with Posit offers a critical advantage: an internally managed system that bypasses the public internet, safeguarding sensitive data. This internal management is paramount given Biogen’s stringent requirements for data privacy, security, and protection when evaluating new AI vendors.