Not every part of establishment approval needs automation equally. Two steps carry almost all of the manual burden.
The two expensive steps
Classification and establishment lookup are where hours disappear. Classifying a composite product correctly requires checking the recipe against the Combined Nomenclature, and looking up an establishment means searching TRACES NT for the right country and activity, not just the right supplier name.
Why classification comes first
Automating establishment checks before classification is automated just moves the bottleneck. If the commodity code is wrong, the establishment check runs against the wrong regulation from the start. This EU establishment approval process guide explains why classification sits upstream of everything else.
Automating classification
AI-based classification against the Combined Nomenclature, with confidence scoring, catches composite products that a chapter-only lookup would miss, and flags low-confidence results for manual review instead of guessing.
Automating establishment validation
Bulk checks against the TRACES database can confirm establishment status for an entire supplier catalogue in the time a manual search takes for one supplier, and re-run automatically before each shipment.
What stays manual
Interpreting genuinely ambiguous composite recipes, and resolving flagged mismatches, still benefits from human review. Automation should surface the exceptions, not hide them.
The net effect
Teams automating both steps report cutting manual compliance effort by roughly 80%, largely by removing repetitive lookups rather than judgement calls.
Watch a demo to see classification and validation automated together.
