RL Jones Customhouse Brokers

Case Study · Customs & Trade Compliance

Challenge

Founded in 1938 in Calexico, California, RL Jones Customhouse Brokers has grown into one of the most established customs brokerage and logistics organizations on the U.S. southern border, with more than 350 employees and operations at every major southern port from San Diego to McAllen. When the Supreme Court struck down IEEPA tariffs in February 2026, RL Jones faced a sudden, high-stakes operational challenge: calculate and recover refunds for thousands of import entries across hundreds of clients, on the strict timelines CBP was prepared to enforce. Reporting could show what entries existed. It could not answer what to do next.

The challenge was structural, not cosmetic. Government entry data lived in ACE, internal shipment records lived in a separate operational system, client histories required their own exports, and tariff logic changed with each CBP bulletin. Answering a client question that crossed those boundaries meant an analyst logging into ACE, downloading entries for one customer, pasting them into a spreadsheet, and running manual cross-reference lookups against tariff schedules and paid duty amounts — work that took hours per client. By the time the answer was ready, the deadline window had narrowed.

Solution Overview

RL Jones’s existing data environment was connected to Amberd’s private LLM, which operates against that data inside RL Jones’s own AWS environment. Sensitive ACE data moves on a controlled schedule into an S3 bucket RL Jones controls; nothing reaches a public model. Compliance teams now query the full data environment in natural language, surface refund eligibility by client, track protest deadlines, and generate exportable customer reports — all in seconds. Scheduled alerts tied to CAPE submission phases notify the right staff automatically when a deadline is approaching, with entry-level detail attached. Results: manual ACE downloads and per-customer Excel workbooks retired from the refund workflow. Three weeks from kickoff to production. A reusable compliance intelligence platform that scales with the next regulatory event without a new project.

  • Surface refund eligibility by client in seconds
  • Track protest and liquidation deadlines automatically
  • Query all connected data sources in natural language
  • 100% private — data never leaves your environment
  • Zero analysts required for compliance questions
  • 3 weeks from kickoff to production deployment
Project Info

Category

Customs & Trade Compliance

Client

RL Jones Customhouse Brokers

Industry

Logistics & Customs Brokerage

Stack

AWS, Private LLM, ACE Integration

The recent regulatory and tariff changes created an enormous operational challenge for both our teams and our clients. Before Amberd, much of the work required manual research, complex data comparison, and significant time spent navigating disconnected systems and regulatory information. What Amberd helped us build has fundamentally improved the speed and efficiency of how we analyze impacted entries, monitor reimbursement opportunities, and respond to rapidly evolving regulatory changes. The ability to access accurate operational intelligence and detailed reporting in seconds instead of hours has had a major impact on our workflows, our responsiveness, and ultimately the level of service we provide to our customers.



— Eduardo “Lalo” Acosta, VP, R.L. Jones Customhouse Brokers

Seconds to Insight
Seconds to Insight
100% Data Privacy
100% Data Privacy
3 Weeks to Production
3 Weeks to Production
Download The Full Case Study
Regulatory Intelligence
Regulatory Intelligence
Monitor tariff changes, CBP rulings, and regulatory updates in real time. Surface the operational impact across your entire client portfolio before the next bulletin is issued.
Entry & Duty Analysis
Entry & Duty Analysis
Query impacted entries, calculate reimbursement exposure, and verify eligibility criteria across hundreds of clients and thousands of historical entries in a single natural-language query.
Deadline & Protest Tracking
Deadline & Protest Tracking
Automated alerts tied to protest windows, liquidation deadlines, and CAPE submission phases notify the right staff at the right time — with entry-level detail already attached.

Conclusion

The organizations that win the next decade of regulatory complexity will not be the ones with the most spreadsheets or the largest compliance teams. They will be the ones whose leaders can ask any question about any entry, client, deadline, or regulatory change and get a sourced answer in the same conversation. Amberd is that capability — the enterprise intelligence layer: a private, LLM-native platform that unifies government data, operational records, and client histories and delivers intelligence at the speed compliance demands. The RL Jones deployment proves the model works — replacing manual ACE downloads and per-customer workbooks with question-led analysis that reaches across entry data, tariff schedules, and regulatory deadlines in seconds. The next compliance question your analysts cannot answer fast enough: Amberd is built for that.

Amberd. The Enterprise Intelligence Layer.

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