Case Study

M.J. Carrillo Moves 70%+ of Monthly Volume onto Altana in Four Weeks

trucks in a cross-border freight yard

Before Altana

M.J. Carrillo is a nearly 80-year-old, family-run customs brokerage in Laredo, Texas, running high-frequency cross-border shipments where a single product can carry several countries of origin. Entry preparation was highly manual even with AI assistance. Documents arrived as PDFs, Excel, and XML, requiring constant downloading and re-uploading, and entry writers leaned on macros and repeated validation inside their ABI. Section 232, Section 301, and Section 122 layered logic that shifted within hours. One product could require splitting value and weight across countries of origin, applying different treatment to each portion, then recalculating. Their prior AI tool showed no visibility into how entries were built and gave no control over the logic.

With Altana

Altana for Customs Brokerage puts review inside the platform before entries are pushed to the existing ABI, with confidence levels and source data visible on every field, so edge cases are caught early rather than downstream. SOP Studio lets the team define importer-specific rules themselves instead of waiting on external implementation. The Product Catalog supports mass tariff updates, and parallel processing keeps several entries moving at once.
Within four weeks of go-live, 70%+ of monthly shipments ran through Altana, including 100% of the largest importer's entries, at 97.5%+ accuracy. Parts updates were staged ahead of Section 122, so the first shipments under the new rule filed compliant.
“It just feels like you're more in control.”
— Oscar Garza, VP of Operations and Licensed Customs Broker, M.J. Carrillo