Export Licence Database

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The division overseeing the issuance of export licences had an important duty of care when doing so. There was an important process of KYC that had to be undertaken that had to be preceded by a search on the individuals and company concerned, to ascertain whether they were on a blacklist. These blacklists contained the details of these entities and the reasons why they were on it. This was usually either the destination country being under sanctions, or the country being on a watch list and the items being shipped identified as components that could form parts of WMD.

The data that needed to be searched existed as either Excel spreadsheets or physical entries in ledgers. There were several Excel sheets containing variously formatted information. Searches for information across these files took a considerable amount of time.

To support the division in this, I created an Access database on a shared drive and imported all Excel information into it. I developed a front end with various methods of searching, along with all the necessary functions to add and update information.

This small, but powerful tool (soon after being quickly deployed and users shown how to use it) was reported to have saved the department countless man hours in search times during working weeks.