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iCustoms
iCustoms

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Mapping the TRACES NT Workflow End to End

If you are building tooling around EU import compliance, it helps to draw the workflow before writing anything. TRACES NT has a predictable shape, and the failure points sit in known places.

The happy path

  1. A source certificate arrives from the exporter or competent authority.
  2. The operator signs in through EU Login with two-factor authentication.
  3. The correct CHED type is selected: CHED-A, CHED-P, CHED-PP or CHED-D.
  4. Consignment details, certificate numbers and establishment codes are entered.
  5. Codes are checked against official lists.
  6. The document is signed electronically and submitted.
  7. The border control post records a decision, visible in real time. ## Where it breaks

Steps four and five are human, and they are the ones that generate holds. Under TRACES Classic the same information travelled on printed, signed and stamped paper, so errors surfaced late and slowly. TRACES NT surfaces them faster, but it does not prevent them. The wider context for how this workflow evolved is covered in this look at the TRACES NT document workflow.

Instrumenting the weak steps

Log the time between certificate receipt and CHED submission. Log every code correction. Two weeks of that data usually shows which suppliers, product lines or operators generate the rework. Then automate extraction for the fields that fail most often rather than trying to automate everything at once.

Reporting

Qlik Sense replaced QlikView in 2024 and supports flexible filtering, so operational metrics can be pulled from the platform side as well as your own.

See the extraction and validation workflow running end to end: watch a demo.

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