Solution | Predictive Risk Evaluation for Food Shipments (PREDICT)

The Need

The US Food and Drug Administration is responsible for inspecting food and medical imports entering the country. Front-line inspectors at ports and border crossings remain the linchpin for the FDA’s food and medical device surety efforts. With the increasing volume and complexity of food and medical imports, supplying these inspectors with automated, actionable information to use in their inspection decisions has become imperative.

The Solution

PREDICT is a US Food and Drug Administration solution developed using modules of NTELX’s proprietary technology. It is designed to help inspectors at border entry points identify high-risk shipments. PREDICT combines NTELX’s predictive analytics and scoring and complex event management capabilities with FDA’s expertise, to predict the risk or likelihood of risky shipments entering the country. Shipments are scored based on the potential risk they present, enabling inspectors to determine more quickly whether the shipment should be manually inspected or if it can be cleared. FDA inspectors are able to gain immediate insight and take action in real-time to improve efficiency.

PREDICT considers everything from whether a product is intrinsically risky like raw seafood for example, to information acquired from previous examinations of shippers or producers, floods, hot weather and market conditions that suggest whether a particular shipment is at risk of being spoiled or hazardous. The solution assigns a lower risk score to less hazardous imports, resulting in labeled products with good histories to be held up for shorter periods. Inspectors can determine better if a shipment meets identified criteria for physical examination or sampling and analysis, or if the shipment warrants additional reviews based on assigned risk scores.

PREDICT significantly enhances FDA’s targeting capabilities by enabling inspectors to use data from a much wider range of sources to inform entry point decisions. PREDICT uses better intelligence to help inspectors determine which shipments to check, based on the variety of assessments to rank import shipments according to risk available through the solution.

PREDICT improved the detection of risky imports significantly while also reducing the number of shipments requiring manual inspections. The solution enabled FDA inspectors to process several million customs entries per year. FDA inspectors can more efficiently operate entry point reviews and inspections and flag risky shipments before they are processed through, helping reduce the strain on resources by checking only a fraction of shipments.

See PREDICT in action.