Amber Road, a leading provider of global trade management solutions (GTM), has announced that Azelis, a top global specialty chemicals distributor, has signed a worldwide contract with Amber Road for an automated restricted party screening solution. After a decade of rapid international growth, Azelis today combines more than 37 specialist distribution companies in a single organization serving the worldwide life sciences and industrial markets. It conducts around 430,000 export transactions annually with more than 50,000 trading partners around the world. The management complexity created by the sheer volume of trade transactions is exacerbated by the increasingly tough regulatory environment governing international trade. As a group active with companies throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and Canada, Azelis must take special care not to ship products to any entities present on restricted party lists maintained by countries that host its network companies. In addition, due to contractual requirements from some of Azelis’ United States-based suppliers, Azelis also must comply with restricted party lists in the US and with embargoes imposed by the US Government. Without a comprehensive and automated system, tracking fast-changing regulations on a global basis and continually evaluating existing and new trading partners is extremely difficult. Realizing it needed to prevent illegal transactions and protect itself from potential fines, penalties and sanctions, Azelis sought an automated screening solution that would also reduce operational costs by eliminating time-intensive manual screening processes. In searching for the right solution, Azelis emphasized high accuracy and a low rate of false positives as key requirements “Amber Road’s ISO 9001 process for updating trade content within 48 hours gives us vital confidence that we will remain compliant even in the face of changing regulations,” said Gerrit De Vos, Chief Compliance Officer at Azelis. “We were also impressed by how easy it is to use the solution and yet at the same time its automated screening of transactions is comprehensive and powerful.”The proven ability to reduce false positives to consistently less than 0.5% and strong references in other BENELUX-headquartered global companies were additional factors in Amber Road’s favor. Amber Road CEO Jim Preuninger said, “Azelis’ decision to ramp-up its compliance is very timely. With headlines touching on Russia, Syria, Iran and other markets, and increasing regulation, trade compliance is top of mind for many companies.”Amber Road’s solution is to be integrated with Azelis’ ERP system, with a planned rollout to 33 countries in stages starting with an Azelis entity in Belgium. .