GHY cuts database turnaround from 1 hour to 15 minutes, and catches what a busy team could miss

Founded in 1901 and headquartered in Winnipeg, Manitoba, GHY provides customs brokerage and trade compliance services to North American importers and exporters, plus trade consulting, cross-border logistics, and warehousing.

Before Tru, every trade specialist at GHY maintained their own client databases by hand in Excel. Updates ran through VLOOKUPs against a shared master list, then got restructured with Copilot before they could be loaded back into the system. Macros broke. The master spreadsheet drifted out of date. With multiple people editing the same file, small errors compounded fast.

Database work is foundational to clean entries, but it's also the first thing that gets pushed aside when a team is busy releasing shipments. Every regulatory change meant another full pass through the file, and as 2025's tariff actions stacked on top of each other, the manual process couldn't keep pace.

GHY moved database updates onto Tru, and consolidated a job that used to be spread across roughly twenty trade specialists into one person, Sarah Marcotte, Special Projects Manager, who now manages the company's entire database workload.

Tru doesn't just return a classification. For every product, it shows which HTS codes it selected and which ones it ruled out, with the chapter notes explaining why. That transparency changed how Sarah's team works with it. Instead of taking an output on faith, they can check the reasoning, catch anything that looks off, and use the logic to train newer staff on classification instead of just handing them a number.

That responsibility paid off directly. While loading a database, Sarah forgot that one client sourced goods from Russia and had left them under a general HTS code. Tru caught it and applied the correct, newly updated Russian tariff, the kind of miss that would have gone straight through to CBP under the old process.

A database update that used to take about an hour now takes roughly fifteen minutes, regardless of size. On one day alone, Sarah processed around twenty databases alongside her other work. That speed is opening room to do what GHY couldn't before: give trade specialists dedicated time for database maintenance instead of forcing them to choose between that and releasing entries.

The shift in confidence has been just as significant. Sarah no longer has to run multiple manual checks to trust what's in the database. A quick review is enough. And the effect reaches clients too: one customer's trade compliance lead noticed how much faster her answers were coming back and asked what changed.