Team Augmentation & Software Development
Our client is an international trading house operating across metals, minerals and raw materials markets. With offices spanning Europe, Asia, North America and Africa, the group manages thousands of trade transactions monthly, each supported by extensive documentation, compliance workflows and internal operational systems. As the business scaled rapidly, their engineering capability struggled to keep pace.
The group's engineering team had grown organically alongside the business, but increasing trade volumes and an ambitious internal systems modernisation programme placed significant pressure on their technology function. The client needed to rapidly scale with experienced professionals who could integrate with existing delivery squads and contribute immediately — without the lead time of permanent hiring.
In parallel, the client faced a critical operational bottleneck: the manual processing of high volumes of trade documentation. Contracts, certificates of origin, quality inspection reports, bills of lading and compliance records were largely handled by hand. This created delays in trade settlement, introduced reconciliation risk, and consumed significant analyst time that could be redirected to higher-value work.
InnovaLab provided a blended team of offshore and nearshore engineers, quality assurance professionals and project managers. Working directly within the client's existing delivery squads, our team augmented internal capacity while contributing specialist skills in areas where the client's own capability was stretched. The model gave the group immediate access to experienced resource whilst maintaining full control over priorities and direction.
Alongside the team augmentation programme, InnovaLab designed and delivered a purpose-built AI document ingress system to address the documentation processing bottleneck. The system combines optical character recognition, natural language processing and machine learning to automatically extract, classify and route data from incoming trade documents — including contracts, quality certificates, shipping documents and regulatory compliance records.
The ingress system integrates directly with the client's internal operations platforms, eliminating manual data entry and dramatically reducing the time between document receipt and downstream processing. Structured extraction rules are supplemented by ML-based confidence scoring, so edge cases are flagged for human review rather than silently misclassified. The result is a resilient, auditable pipeline that scales with trade volume.
