Treat the Due Diligence Statement as a pipeline with five stages: collect, assess, mitigate, submit, reference. Each stage has an input, an output and a failure mode, which makes the whole thing easier to build and easier to monitor.
Stage by stage
Collect. Input: supplier records. Output: plot geolocation plus supporting evidence. Failure mode: incomplete coordinates. Assess. Input: country benchmarking and supplier evidence. Output: a risk position of negligible or non-negligible. Failure mode: undocumented reasoning. Mitigate. Input: a non-negligible risk. Output: either mitigation evidence or a decision to withhold the product from the market. Failure mode: proceeding without either. Submit. Input: a completed statement. Output: a reference number from the EUDR Information System. Failure mode: filing before data is validated. Reference. Input: the reference number. Output: a customs declaration that quotes it. Failure mode: a mismatch, which stops the consignment.
Instrument the pipeline
Each stage deserves a status you can query, because compliance questions arrive as questions about individual consignments. If your logistics team cannot answer "does this load have a valid reference" in seconds, the pipeline is not finished. A missing reference stops the load in the same way a missing health certificate does, and the five-step DDS filing process explains how each stage connects to the next.
Design for repetition
Statements are not one-off events. Sourcing changes, plots change and country classifications change, so make re-running a stage cheap.
FAQs
Can mitigation be skipped for low risk countries? Low risk allows simplified due diligence, but the assessment still has to happen.
Who owns the pipeline? Operators and traders both hold obligations, so ownership must be agreed contractually.
Watch a demo and walk through the workflow with iCustoms
Top comments (0)