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iCustoms
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Building an EU Establishment Approval Workflow That Doesn't Break at Volume

A one-off establishment check is easy. A workflow that holds up across hundreds of products and suppliers is a different problem.

Step one in the workflow: classification

Every check starts with an accurate commodity code, including for composite products. Get this step wrong and the rest of the workflow checks against the wrong rule entirely.

Step two: regulation mapping

Route the code to either Regulation (EC) 853/2004 or Regulation (EU) 1069/2009, depending on whether it's food or animal by-product material. This products requiring EU establishment approval breakdown lays out which chapters go where.

Step three: establishment lookup

Query the TRACES NT lists for the exporting country and activity. This is the step that doesn't scale manually once you're working across a full supplier catalogue.

Step four: re-validation trigger

Build a check that fires before every shipment, not once a year. Approval status changes without notice, and a stale check is worse than no check because it creates false confidence.

Where workflows commonly fail

Most breakdowns happen at step three, where teams either skip the activity-level check (approved for meat, not for by-products) or rely on a supplier's self-declared status instead of the official list.

Automating the workflow

Bulk validation against the TRACES database, with confidence scoring on classification, removes the two steps most prone to manual error.

Watch a demo to see this workflow running end to end.

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