Digital Transformation Consulting

The European Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG MARE) faced the niche challenge of managing and analyzing over 2,000 complex business rules for validating fish catch data submitted by EU member states and third-party countries. These legacy rules, which ensure the correctness and completeness of data such as catch quantities linked to specific months, were embedded in siloed applications that hindered cross-referencing and comprehensive analysis, thereby limiting transparency and enforcement capabilities.

To address this, Accenture supported DG MARE’s digital transformation by migrating their legacy IT applications to the AWS cloud platform and developing a tailored generative AI tool. This tool leverages large language models to understand the logic of existing rules and automatically generate cloud-compatible code, significantly accelerating the rewriting process. The solution refactored each rule in just one minute with 90% accuracy, reducing an estimated 12,000 person-days of manual coding to a fraction of that time. This efficiency gain enabled DG MARE to rapidly adapt its business rules for the cloud environment and free up developer resources.

The quantifiable results included substantial productivity improvements, allowing the team to dedicate more time to innovative analytics use cases. For example, they are exploring solutions that automatically compare complex vessel navigation patterns and catch reports across vessels to identify suspicious or anomalous activities. Overall, the tailored AI-driven refactoring process and integrated data analytics capabilities have made DG MARE more agile in enforcing seafood sustainability policies and enhancing data-driven decision-making in the maritime sector.