Trick PCO Service: A Relevant Support to Companies Dealing With Preferential Certificate of Origin for Their Products

At the end of July 2023, the TRICK project has reached an important milestone: the release of the six business services which will be accessible from the B2B Marketplace and integrated into the TRICK core platform. Among the six TRICK business services, the PCO – Preferential Certification of Origin – service has been designed and implemented with two main aims:

• support companies in collecting the evidence and documentation necessary for the Preferential Certification of Origin request (used to calculate custom duties) through a complete and secured production traceability, compliant with current Customs legislation and based on TARIC product standard codes and NACE 2 manufacturer standard identification;
• to speed up the access to the documentation related to a shipping by the Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency, enabling the possibility of publishing the most relevant information through the blockchain, i.e. for customers or consumers.

Traceability as prerequisite and enabler of the PCO service

At the basis of the PCO service there is a basic traceability service which allows companies to collect ordered and well-organized information about the lots of a specific product along the entire supply chain, from raw material to the sale of the final product, through a valuable approach to the collection and management of data related to “traceability for sustainability”. In fact, at the basis of the TRICK project's approach to traceability there is a holistic data model that allows the platform to support and guide companies in the collection of data relating to the circularity and healthiness of materials, the environmental footprint of traced products, ethical and social aspects, as well as building an organized dossier of data and documentation relating to the shipments subject to the request for the Preferential Certificate of Origin.

The data collected by the Traceability service are inputs for all the TRICK business services: the set of data in common to all services, such as those related to the company, the product, the traced objects, the main steps of the production process, etc., are stored in the platform and provided to the other TRICK business services when requested.

The PCO service

The workflow of PCO service was analyzed and defined by involving all the relevant actors of the two Textile and Clothing (TC) pilots: the  Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency as legal authority with its information system AIDA, Domina as IT partner responsible of the development of the TRICK platform and the PCO service, ACCUDIRE as external customs software service that interacts with both platforms and manages the Custom Declaration request and the interaction with the logistics players in the TC pilots.

The company requesting the PCO service will be supported in the retrieval of those data necessary to support a Customs Declaration and to request a PCO certificate for a shipment. The TRICK platform manages all the interactions with the Customs information system and the external Custom software to obtain the PCO certificate and to provide to the company the related official information (i.e. identifiers and the certificate itself). 

PCO service dashboard

Very important in this process is the role of the Blockchain, which guarantees data consistency and immutability, preserving confidentiality and trustiness.

In case of inspections, the Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency will have full access to all the information stored in the dossiers and associated to shippings object of PCO procedures. In this way the service will give an important contribute to speed up and simplify the existing Customs procedures.  Moreover, it may provide and new standard model of interaction between Customs and industrial supply chains.

CONTACT PERSON & EMAIL ADDRESS: 

• Gessica Ciaccio - ENEA (email)