TraceLM
EN 10204 certificate automation for steel processors
Mill test certificates arrive as PDFs and scans. EN 10204 certificate automation turns them into signed 3.1 and 2.2 certificates, with the data validated and every product traceable back to its heat.
In production at an Athens Stock Exchange-listed steel company, on real certificates and real data.
Send us twenty certificates
An engineer, not a sales rep, replies within one business day.
The certificate is the product record, and it is on paper
A steel processor receives mill test certificates from a dozen mills, each in its own layout, most as scanned PDFs. When a customer orders, somebody opens those files, finds the right heat numbers, copies chemical composition and mechanical properties into a template, and issues a certificate.
That manual step carries the whole business. Everything downstream depends on it: customer deliveries, traceability audits, complaints, and now the Digital Product Passport. Three specific problems come out of it.
Certificates are assembled by hand, one order at a time
Each certificate means opening the right source documents, locating the heats that went into this delivery, and transcribing composition and mechanical properties into a template. Ten minutes per certificate is a good day. It does not get faster with volume, it gets slower, because the folder of source documents keeps growing and the person who knows where things are is the constraint.
The work is also unevenly distributed. It lands at dispatch, when the order is already late, and it lands on the quality department rather than on anyone with spare capacity.
A transposed digit stays invisible until your customer finds it
Copying a yield strength of 355 as 335 produces a certificate that looks entirely normal. Nothing downstream checks it. The error surfaces at the customer's incoming inspection, weeks later, attached to a delivery that has already been installed or processed.
At that point it is no longer a data-entry mistake. It is a rejected delivery, a credit note, and a conversation about whether your certificates can be trusted in general.
Nobody can answer a traceability question quickly
An auditor, a customer or an insurer asks which heat a specific bundle came from. If the link between the physical material and the mill certificate lives in a spreadsheet and somebody's memory, answering takes days and the answer is a reconstruction rather than a record.
The Digital Product Passport turns this from an occasional inconvenience into a standing obligation, because a passport is a per-product record and you cannot produce one from documents you cannot query.
What EN 10204 certificate automation does
TraceLM sits between the documents you receive and the certificates you issue. Four steps:
- IngestMill test certificates and tensile-test reports are pulled in as PDFs, whatever the mill's template.
- ExtractOCR plus a language model reads chemical composition, mechanical properties, heat and batch identifiers.
- ValidateRules check every value against the grade and the order. Each field carries a confidence score.
- GenerateEN 10204 3.1 and 2.2 certificates are produced per order, traceable to heat and batch.
The step that matters is the third one. Extraction alone produces a number; extraction with validation produces a number you can put your name to. Fields below the confidence threshold, or outside the expected range for the grade, are held for an operator instead of being written into a certificate.
Which certificate you owe your customer
EN 10204:2004 defines four document types. The distinction that causes most rejected deliveries is between 2.2 and 3.1: both carry test results, but only one of them is traceable to the material actually shipped.
| Type | Name | Inspection | Test results | Validated by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Declaration of compliance | Non-specific | None | Manufacturer |
| 2.2 | Test report | Non-specific | From production, not necessarily your lot | Manufacturer |
| 3.1 | Inspection certificate | Specific | From the delivered material | Manufacturer's authorised inspection representative, independent of production |
| 3.2 | Inspection certificate | Specific | From the delivered material | Manufacturer's representative and an independent inspector |
TraceLM issues 3.1 and 2.2. A 3.2 requires a third-party inspector to witness and co-sign, which is a process question, not a software one. We wrote up the 3.1 versus 2.2 decision in more detail, because getting it wrong is expensive in both directions.
Where the Digital Product Passport comes in
Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, iron and steel is among the first product groups in the Commission's 2025-2030 working plan, and the preparatory study is under way. No delegated act for steel has been adopted yet, and ESPR requires at least 18 months between a delegated act entering into force and applying, so the realistic horizon is around 2028.
That horizon is not the reason to act. The reason is that a Digital Product Passport is a reporting format, and you cannot report what you never captured in a structured form. Processors whose certificate data is already machine-readable will treat the passport as an export. Processors whose data is in scans will treat it as a project.
The DPP plugin publishes the product record TraceLM already holds. If you want the regulatory detail, we summarised what is decided and what is not.
What it does not do
It does not replace your quality department. It does not issue 3.2 certificates. It does not read a certificate that a human cannot read either, and a bad scan is still a bad scan. And if you issue a handful of certificates a month, the honest answer is that a spreadsheet and a careful colleague will beat any software we could sell you.
Questions we get asked
Does it work with certificates from any mill?
Yes. Extraction is not template-based, so a new mill's layout does not require a new parser. Accuracy on an unfamiliar layout is lower at first, which is why every field carries a confidence score and low-confidence fields are queued for review rather than written silently.
Who signs the certificate?
You do. TraceLM prepares the certificate and the underlying data; the authorised representative in your quality department reviews and releases it. EN 10204 3.1 requires validation by the manufacturer's authorised inspection representative, and software does not replace that role.
What happens when the OCR gets a value wrong?
It is caught before the certificate exists. Validation rules check values against the expected ranges for the grade and against the order, and anything outside them, or below the confidence threshold, is flagged for an operator. Corrections are made in the interface before generation.
Can it run on our own servers?
Yes. The extraction stack can run on-premise on open-weight models where certificate data cannot leave your infrastructure. This is one of the first things we scope on the call, because it changes the deployment.
How long does it take to get running?
We start with a sample of your real certificates, typically a few hundred, and report back on what the pipeline extracts and where it struggles. That assessment takes about two weeks and ends in a written go or no-go before any commitment.
Next step
See it read your certificates, not our demo set
Bring a sample of real mill test certificates. Within two weeks you get a written assessment of what the pipeline extracts, where it needs review, and whether the volume justifies automating at all.
Free 45-minute call. Then a two-week data audit with a written go/no-go before you commit to anything.
Send us the problem
An engineer, not a sales rep, replies within one business day.