A retailer that designs its own products carries the manufacturer's responsibility. Every SKU placed on a market must meet that market's regulations: substances, safety, labelling, packaging, claims. Multiply by the number of product families, then by the number of countries: knowing what applies to each SKU becomes the longest part of the job.

Each local firm answers for its own market, and the question comes up again with every new SKU. Between two consultations, the texts live on and pile up.

Cleo starts from the text. Each obligation is written in testable form: an operator, a threshold, the product field it bears on, the article it rests on and its date of application. Once encoded, it applies to every SKU that falls within its scope, and the team reviews and updates it every week.

Cleo then matches the catalogue against this base. For each SKU and each target market, the screen shows only three states: the obligation is covered, it is still to be verified, or the product data is missing to decide. This third state counts as much as the other two: it says exactly what is missing, and what to go and find.

The questions this work brings up are of the same kind as these:

• Does this material fall within the scope of an Annex XVII restriction?
• Is the expected sorting instruction the same in all twenty-seven Member States?
• Which date of application holds for this product, and how many days do we have left?

On each one, the answer cites the text down to the article, so that the compliance team can take it up and carry it themselves.

What the set-up changes:

• Traceability. Every obligation retained carries its article and its date, which makes the file presentable as is during an inspection.
• Monitoring. A publication in the Official Journal arrives attached to the SKUs it concerns, with the time remaining before application.

Product and quality teams then work on the same base, kept up to date, and keep their time for the decisions that call for it.