IT Modernization Speeds Food Export Certification

Challenge

Managing Complex Export Requirements for Food Safety and Global Trade

Organizations responsible for food safety play a critical role in ensuring that meat, poultry, and egg products entering global markets meet both U.S. safety standards and the import requirements of partner countries. Inspectors and program personnel must review export documentation carefully to confirm that shipments comply with evolving international regulations.

An agency responsible for overseeing export certification faced growing complexity as country-specific requirements changed frequently and export volumes increased.

Managing these requirements relied on manual, paper-based processes to define and update country profiles used by inspectors and system administrators. These steps were time-consuming and sometimes difficult to maintain at scale, creating challenges for personnel responsible for ensuring accurate and compliant export documentation.

The organization needed to move from a paper-based export certification process to a digital system that could better support inspectors, improve the management of country-specific requirements, and provide greater visibility into export volume, compliance, and related operational data.

Solution

Modernizing Export Certification Workflows

Revolutional designed and built the agency’s export certification system to modernize how country-specific requirements are defined, managed, and applied. We built the system to simplify the management of export rules, reduce manual steps for inspectors during certificate processing, and give the agency a more flexible foundation for adapting to changing international requirements.

The system includes a country profile module that makes it easier for system librarians to define and update country-specific export requirements. The interface allows administrators to manage regulatory rules more efficiently while reducing the likelihood of manual errors.

Based on feedback from inspection personnel, the team also implemented digital signature options that allow export certificates to capture the inspector, establishment, date, and time through a system signature while avoiding per-signature costs. This approach maintains compliance and traceability while improving the usability of the system.

To further improve flexibility, Revolutional developed a system that enables dynamic fields, attestation statements, and export forms tailored to each country’s requirements. This capability allows the system to adapt more quickly as international trade regulations change.

Impact

Improving Efficiency and Accuracy in Export Certification

The export certification system significantly improved operational efficiency for inspectors and system administrators responsible for managing the export certification process. By reducing the number of steps required for export certificate processing by 90 percent and cutting export documentation processing time by 55 percent, the updated system enables personnel to complete certification tasks faster while maintaining accuracy and compliance.

These improvements support a high-volume, globally connected mission, helping the agency process over 350,000 export applications annually and manage certification requirements for more than 150 countries, including key trading partners such as China, Canada, and Mexico. Together, these capabilities strengthen the agency’s ability to facilitate safe global trade while improving visibility into export activity and helping uphold the food safety standards required for products entering international markets.