Migrations rarely get documented well, but the move from TRACES Classic to TRACES NT is a useful case study in how a legacy government system gets replaced without breaking live trade flows.
Where TRACES Classic came from
TRACES Classic launched in 2004, merging two older systems, ANIMO and SHIFT, following the European Parliament's push for better animal traceability after the 1997 classical swine fever outbreak. An IMPORT module was added in 2006, and plant health functionality followed in 2013.
The rebuild
TRACES NT launched in 2017 with a modern interface and wider scope. Rather than a hard cutover, both systems ran in parallel for years. TRACES Classic was not fully decommissioned until 2022, the same year more than 2.3 million documents were signed electronically on the new platform. Our full history of the EU TRACES system covers every milestone in that transition, including the 2019 rule that made the Common Health Entry Document mandatory.
What this means for integrations built on top
Any tooling built against TRACES needs to account for a platform that continues to evolve. Establishment lists, certificate types and analytics (QlikView gave way to Qlik Sense in 2024) all shift over time. Systems that hardcode assumptions about TRACES structure age badly.
The practical takeaway
Build validation and certification checks against the current TRACES NT data source, not a cached or assumed structure, and expect the underlying lists to change without notice.
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