CITTA Brokerage Deploys Reform to Accelerate Duty Drawback Turnaround

The Problem: Processing Bottlenecks Threatened Revenue

For CITTA Brokerage, a customs brokerage focused exclusively on duty drawback, speed isn’t just a metric—it’s money. Duty drawback allows companies to recover 99% of duties paid on imported goods, but with a strict five-year lookback window, time can be quite an obstacle. Every delay in processing historical data means potential refunds “age out” and are lost forever.

CITTA’s specific challenge was the “import input” workflow—their single most complex use case. Processing thousands of pages of non-standardized PDFs and spreadsheets required turnaround times that could drag from weeks to months.  And because the company was growing, new staff had to be trained on complex tariff instructions. Outsourcing failed due to quality issues, and in-house manual entry just wasn’t scalable.

“The input documents are not always normalized,” explains Jerry Cunningham, Process Improvement Manager at CITTA. “Plus, there’s an extensive amount of post-extraction work required to get the output we need. It was our biggest bottleneck.”

The Solution: An AI-Enabled Partnership, Not Just Another Tool

CITTA needed more than a super-charged document processing tool, they needed an AI partner that could handle the nuance of customs data. Reform collaborated directly with Jerry and the team at CITTA to configure automations that could handle the logic of their complex import processing.

Unlike previous providers that offered static dashboards or slow service due to the need to constantly retrain on the intricacies of duty drawback data, Reform empowered CITTA with an AI-enabled, self-service interface. This allows Jerry to build and control his own workflows. When testing Reform, Jerry threw a “stack of documents” at the system to extract what, to the naked eye, looked like random alphanumeric tracking numbers—a task that can often stump humans. Reform achieved what Jerry thought possible was not possible: 100% accuracy.

“I’ll send something to Reform, then go grab a snack, but it’s returned results before I can even log off and stand up,” says Jerry. “What used to take weeks now happens in a matter of minutes.”

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The Result: 1,600 Hours Saved Monthly

By deploying Reform, CITTA has transformed its operations from a manual burden into a scalable, automated business advantage. The impact was immediate and measurable:

• 10x efficiency gain: CITTA eliminated the need for manual data entry (in-house and outsourced), saving more than 1,600 hours per month.‍
• Speed to value: Automating a new complex workflow now takes 20-30 minutes with Reform, compared to a week or more of manual setup and training.
• Scale: The system now processes 5,000+ pages of PDFs simultaneously with ease.‍
• Faster onboarding: Client data validation is now completed in days instead of weeks. “That faster feedback on completeness has made onboarding smoother,” notes Jerry. “The bottleneck of processing documents is pretty much negated thanks to Reform.”‍

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With Reform, CITTA has eliminated the manual grunt work so they can focus on what they do best: navigating complex import regulations to maximize refunds for their clients before the clock runs out. CITTA has always had a focus on customer service, and working with Reform has enabled them to renew that focus. After working with Reform’s team to establish their workflow automations, they freed up the bandwidth to continue working closely with their own customers. It’s the combination of technology and human ingenuity that sets up a company in this industry for success.

“I was skeptical of AI; I didn’t think it was advanced enough to handle the complexity of a duty drawback filing. I’m happy to tell you that I was wrong. Reform is capable. It’s like magic.”

- Jerry Cunningham, Client Success and Process Improvement Manager at CITTA Brokerage