Feasibility of digitalizing conformity assessment certificates and making them accessible : executive summary

This report analyses the feasibility of making digitalised certificates of conformity assessment publicly accessible online for a wide range of industrial CE-marked products. To understand the available database options, this study assesses existing product databases run by the European Commission, notified bodies and others, and the data needs of stakeholders (market surveillance and customs authorities, notifying authorities, notified bodies and economic operators). This report identifies account-approval processes, product identifiers, interfaces, complex searches, backups, version management, changes to legislation and the Commission's administrative support as the most important aspects to consider for any technical implementation. Five scenarios are assessed using cost-benefit analysis and multi- criteria analysis. Three of the scenarios (a simple, centralised database, a federated database, and a decentralised database) are for third-party certified products only. The other two scenarios (a sophisticated, centralised database and a decentralised database using the DPP) are for all CE-marked products. This paper recommends an incremental approach, starting with the simple, centralised database (based on the SMCS/NANDO system) for third-party conformity-assessed products only, and extending it in the future to either a sophisticated, centralised database or a DPP-based, decentralised database. This would lead to third-party conformity-assessment certificates becoming digitally available relatively quickly and cost- efficiently. In the long term, this approach would be the most effective and efficient due to synergies with the DPP.