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Solution · Operations & qualityEvery product's conformity evidence current, indexed and ready to send
Product compliance evidence, ready before it is asked for
Supplier declarations and certificates are read on arrival, indexed against the material master with their validity dates, chased before they expire and assembled into a dossier on request.
Executive summary
Customers ask for the declaration; someone searches supplier emails and a shared drive to find it.
We build an evidence library that maintains itself.
Routine requests are answered the day they arrive: assembly is a query against an index, not a search across a drive, a mailbox and two memories.
SharePoint evidence library with Microsoft Purview retention labels; customer compliance portals; the assembled dossier as an indexed pack
Business problem
Product compliance
The evidence a manufacturer needs is mostly not written by the manufacturer. Declarations of conformity, safety data sheets and substance declarations come from component suppliers and contract manufacturers, arrive as attachments to ordinary emails, in whatever layout each supplier prefers. The company that answers for the finished product owns almost none of the paperwork that proves it.
Requests come from three directions and none can be scheduled. Customers and retailers ask before a listing or a first delivery. Authorities and notified bodies ask during market surveillance or an audit, usually with a short deadline. Internal teams ask when a product is launched or a component swapped. Each request is a small research project, run by the people who should be preventing the next quality problem.
At scale the arithmetic stops working. A few thousand active materials, three to five evidence documents behind each, every document with a validity date, an issuer and a revision it belongs to. Nobody watches those dates, so expiry is discovered when a customer refuses the document. The reflex is to write to the supplier again, so the same declaration is collected twice while the copy on the drive sits there looking current.
How it works today
This is the pattern we find wherever product evidence is collected rather than produced.
- PersonA supplier declaration arrives as a reply in a purchasing or quality mailbox and is saved to a folder named after the supplier
- PersonSomeone renames the file and, if there is time, notes the article number in a compliance spreadsheet
- WaitingNothing checks the validity date, so a declaration issued three years ago looks exactly like a current one
- PersonA request arrives and a specialist searches the drive, the mailbox and the spreadsheet, then writes to the supplier for what is missing
- WaitingThe supplier answers in three to five working days; the deadline the customer set was shorter
- PersonThe documents are assembled into a pack, emailed or uploaded to the customer's portal, a copy saved somewhere
- Risk of errorWhat was never collected surfaces at an audit or a customer's incoming check, with the product already on the shelf
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The budget shows headcount, not what it is spent on.
- Searching is the job, not answering. The specialist knows within a minute what the customer needs; the rest goes on finding out whether the company already holds it, and in what version.
- Expiry is invisible until someone else finds it. A document that lapsed quietly is worse than a missing one, because everyone assumes the file is covered and nobody is chasing the supplier.
- Requests block commercial events. A listing or a first delivery waits on a document that exists somewhere, and the delay is charged to sales rather than compliance.
- Cover is thin. Two people know which supplier sends what and in which format; when they are away, the honest answer to a customer is that it will take a week.
Cost of inaction
A dossier that arrives four days late still arrives, and that is the trap. The customer is annoyed rather than lost, the listing goes live a week later, and nothing on the profit and loss account carries the cost. What is spent shows up as four specialists whose week is mostly retrieval, and as the contract nobody bid for because its evidence pack was wanted in 48 hours.
The exposure that grows is different in kind. Components change, suppliers change, and a proportion of the declarations on the drive stops covering what the factory builds. Nobody knows which proportion, because nothing compares the revision on the document with the revision in the bill of material. That gap is found by an auditor or a customer, after the product has shipped.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A European consumer electronics manufacturer: around 2,800 active materials, three contract manufacturers, component suppliers across Europe and Asia, SAP S/4HANA for material master and bills of material, Microsoft 365 E3. Product compliance sits with four people in quality.
About 340 document requests and renewals a month: customer, retailer and tender requests; renewals of documents nearing their validity date; new intake when a component or contract manufacturer changes. A third need a document chased from a supplier.
Documents arrive in a quality mailbox and are filed by supplier on a shared drive; a spreadsheet lists what is held for the larger article numbers. Requests are answered by searching, chasing and assembling a pack by hand.
Around 16 minutes of searching, chasing and assembly per request or renewal, and no way to see what is missing until someone asks. Documents that lapse are found by the customer.
Supplier documents are read on arrival, indexed against the material master with type, issuer, dates, validity and the revision they cover, and filed in one library. Expiring documents are chased automatically, and a request is answered by assembling the current documents for the articles named.
In the modelled case the routine request is answered the same day rather than the same week, expiry becomes a scheduled chase rather than a complaint, and the gap list exists before the audit. Illustrative, not a client result.
Proposed solution
We build an evidence library that maintains itself. Every document arriving in the compliance mailbox is classified and read: an EU declaration of conformity by the pre-trained UiPath Document Understanding model for that type, everything else by Generative Extraction, which copes with the layout variety that makes a template per supplier unworkable. What the robot pulls out is not the whole document but the fields that make it findable: issuer, type, products covered, issue date, validity, revision and standards referenced.
Those fields become metadata on a SharePoint library, matched against the SAP material master and against the bill of material that ties a finished article to the components whose evidence it depends on. That match turns a drive of PDFs into an answerable question. An unmatched part number, or a low-confidence field, becomes a validation task in UiPath Action Center completed inside Microsoft Teams.
The library then does two jobs. A daily job in UiPath Orchestrator runs the validity clock: documents near expiry generate a request to the supplier from the compliance mailbox, with reminders, then an escalation to the category buyer in Teams. A request raised in a SharePoint list surfaced as a Teams tab, naming articles, customer and document types, triggers assembly of the current documents into one indexed pack that lists anything missing rather than omitting it. Quality releases the pack in the Microsoft Teams Approvals app before it leaves, and Microsoft Purview labels govern how long superseded evidence is kept.
UiPath Document Understanding pre-trained EU Declaration of Conformity model and Generative Extraction; UiPath Action Center validation tasks in Microsoft Teams; UiPath Orchestrator queues, time triggers and audit log; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Outlook 365, Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint and Microsoft Teams; SharePoint document libraries with metadata columns; Microsoft Teams Approvals app; Microsoft Purview retention labels
The evidence model: which document types each product family must hold; the matching against material master and bill of material; the validity, revision and supersession rules; the supplier chase cycle with escalation; dossier assembly and export; the gap view and its digest; the request front door and the release step
Read access to the SAP material master and bills of material through UiPath SAP activities (BAPI/OData or a reporting view); upload into customer compliance portals without an interface
How the automated process works
- AutomationA supplier document lands in the compliance mailbox; the robot separates attachments, deduplicates against what is held and queues each one in Orchestrator
- SystemThe document is classified, its fields are read, and it is matched to the material master and the components it covers
- PersonUnmatched part numbers and low-confidence fields go to a specialist as a validation task in Microsoft Teams
- AutomationIt is filed in the SharePoint library with its metadata and retention label; any version it supersedes is marked, not deleted
- AutomationThe daily validity job requests renewals before documents lapse, reminds, then escalates the overdue ones to the category buyer in Teams
- PersonA request naming articles, customer and document types is raised from the Teams tab; quality reviews the assembled pack and releases it in Approvals
- AutomationThe released pack goes to the customer or the portal, the gap list updates, and the weekly digest shows what expires next
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Reading, indexing and filing every incoming supplier document, whatever the layout
- Matching documents to materials, components and the revisions they cover
- Running the validity clock, chasing suppliers and escalating overdue requests
- Assembling requested dossiers from current documents and reporting what is missing
People decide
- Whether the evidence held is technically sufficient for the product as built today
- What happens when a component change means an existing declaration no longer covers the article
- Which documents a customer, tender or authority actually receives, and the release of the pack
- Which document types each product family must hold, a decision that stays with quality
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Everything below runs on licences and systems you already hold, or would need anyway.
Inputs
- compliance and purchasing shared mailboxes in Outlook
- supplier portal downloads
- SAP material master and bill-of-material data
- existing document folders at start-up
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Document Understanding and Generative Extraction
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- SharePoint evidence library with Microsoft Purview retention labels
- customer compliance portals
- the assembled dossier as an indexed pack
Human touchpoints: validation tasks in Microsoft Teams; the request list as a Teams tab; Teams Approvals for the release; the weekly gap digest in Teams
Technologies used
pre-trained EU Declaration of Conformity model plus Generative Extraction for safety data sheets and substance declarations
Aqueue documents, run the validity clock and the chase cycle, retry and audit every step
Avalidation of unmatched part numbers and low-confidence fields without leaving Teams
Awatch the compliance mailbox, write to the library and the request list
Athe indexed evidence library: document type, issuer, dates, revision and coverage as metadata columns
Aquality releases each customer-facing pack before it is sent
Aretention and disposition of superseded evidence inside your tenant
Awhat the documents are matched against
AIllustrative economic model
A model, not a promise.
€31 an hour is what a quality or compliance specialist costs a Central European manufacturer once everything is loaded in, and 16 minutes is the average handling of one request or renewal, blending an easy lookup with a document that has to be chased. Both are assumptions, not client measurements. Whether the evidence is technically sufficient stays with people and is not priced. The model shows capacity released, not headcount removed.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- Routine requests are answered the day they arrive: assembly is a query against an index, not a search across a drive, a mailbox and two memories.
- Expiry becomes a scheduled supplier chase weeks in advance, not a refusal at a customer's incoming check.
- Gaps are visible before an audit rather than during one, and the list is specific: which article, which document type, which supplier, how overdue.
- Every document sent is the current version for the revision actually being built, and what is missing is stated rather than left for the customer to find.
- New ranges and new suppliers are absorbed by adding materials and rules, not a specialist.
The management view
- Coverage becomes a reportable number: how much of the active catalogue is fully evidenced, and where the holes are.
- Audit preparation shrinks from a project to a filter, because the evidence, its dates and its trail sit in one place.
- Response time to customers and authorities is measured rather than estimated, and no longer depends on who is in the office.
- Knowledge that lives in two specialists' habits becomes rules in a flow, which survives absence, turnover and the next range extension.
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
An auditor should be able to reconstruct every decision.
- The robot reads the SAP material master and bills of material through an account that can only read; nothing here can change a material, a component or a specification.
- Run-time credentials come from a vault, never from a workflow, and every document read, filed, superseded or sent carries an entry in the Orchestrator audit log.
- Documents, metadata, approvals and audit records stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant; robots and extraction run in the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud.
- Nothing customer-facing leaves without a named person releasing it in Approvals, recorded against the file version actually sent.
- Retention, supersession and disposition follow Microsoft Purview labels on the library rather than whoever last tidied the folder.
Why now
European product policy is heading towards more evidence, not less. The Commission's ESPR working plan for 2025 to 2030, adopted in April 2025, adds horizontal measures on repairability and recycled content for electrical and electronic equipment, and the digital product passport is meant to expose durability, repairability and material composition at product level. A company that cannot assemble the evidence it holds will not be ready to publish it.
Retailers and industrial buyers increasingly make the evidence pack a condition of listing rather than a formality after it, which puts compliance on the critical path of revenue. Meanwhile the modelled €2,811 a month goes on retrieval that no longer needs a person.
The building blocks are ordinary now: a supported model for the declaration itself, generative extraction for the layouts nobody could template, a metadata library your tenant already provides, and validation and release inside Microsoft Teams.
Relevant executive roles
Launches and first deliveries stop waiting on documents that already exist somewhere in the company.
Coverage becomes measurable, expiry becomes a schedule, and specialist hours move from retrieval to technical assessment.
The evidence pack a retailer or tender demands arrives inside the deadline, so compliance stops being why a listing slips.
Common questions and objections
That is the argument for generative extraction, not against automation. The declaration of conformity has a supported model; everything else is read without a template per supplier, and what cannot be read reliably goes to a specialist as a task.
Filing is the smaller half. What changes is that each document is linked to the materials and revisions it covers and carries a validity date the system watches. That turns a folder into an answer.
The same person as today, and now they have to be asked. An expired document cannot be assembled into a pack, the pack states what is missing, and quality releases it in Teams before it leaves.
When this is not the right solution
- A small catalogue with stable products and one document type each, where a good list and a calendar reminder cost less than an automation.
- The bill of material does not reliably link a finished article to the components whose evidence it depends on. That link has to be repaired first, and it is a master-data project.
- Nobody can say which document types each product family must hold. That list is a compliance decision: an automation can enforce it, not invent it.
A question for the next management meeting
Could we produce a complete and current evidence pack for our ten highest-revenue articles by Friday, and how many of those documents would turn out to have expired or to cover a component we no longer use?
Implementation approach
The first week looks the same at every client: we look at the data.
We deliver
- One product family end to end: which document types it must hold, where each comes from, and what is held
- Intake from the compliance mailbox with classification, extraction and deduplication
- The matching layer against the SAP material master and bills of material, with Action Center validation for what does not match
- The SharePoint evidence library: metadata model, versioning, supersession and Microsoft Purview retention labels
- The validity clock, the supplier chase cycle with escalation, and the gap view with its digest
- Dossier assembly, the request front door in Teams, the release in Approvals and a runbook for quality
We need from you
- The list of document types required per product family, in whatever form it exists
- A named owner in quality for the evidence model and the release step
- Read access to the SAP material master and bills of material, in test and production
- Access to the compliance mailbox and the document folders, plus recent customer requests
Stages
Discovery
One product family: document types, sources, supplier behaviour and volumes
Design
Evidence model, metadata and matching rules, validity and supersession logic, security model
Build
Intake and extraction, the library, the chase cycle, assembly and the Teams touchpoints
Migration
Existing folders indexed into the library under supervision, with a gap list
Go-live
One family and one customer segment under supervision, then rollout and tuning
Departmental. Effort follows the number of document types in scope, how reliably the bill of material links an article to its components, and how much of the existing archive has to be indexed.
The declaration a customer asks for tomorrow was valid until last March.
Send us one product family: the document types it must carry, where they arrive from, and how they are held today. You get back a coverage and expiry picture for that family, and an assessment of what can be indexed without a person.
List the gaps in one product rangeThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Finished goods sit in the dispatch bay because the certificate of analysis is still being typed.
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