The challenge
A make-to-order packaging manufacturer: roughly 3,000 items in the system, around 200 customers, about 180 orders a month, all custom — there is no standard catalogue. PPWR Regulation (EU) 2025/40 has applied since 12 August 2026, so B2B customers started asking for declarations of conformity. The data those documents need sat in spreadsheets of board compositions, in three suppliers' price lists, in a die-cutting program with no API, and in the owner's head. He did the paperwork on Sundays.
What we built
An application on Open Mercato with three domain modules: a materials database, an FEFCO construction dictionary and a document generator.
A data sheet editor with a live preview — picking a material index pulls in composition, grammage, ECT and thickness, while outer dimensions and weight are computed from the construction geometry.
A die-cut diagram generator in SVG, drawn from dimensions — which sidesteps the licensing problem around FEFCO catalogue drawings.
A generator for EU declarations of conformity following the Annex VIII template, issued per packaging type (construction × board grade × supplier) rather than per item.
An immutable archive: a number from a daily sequence, a PDF rendered with headless Chromium, bytes and checksum in the database. Once issued, editing is blocked; a change means a new version of the document.
A PPWR block with a hard rule: a field with no cover in the supplier's declaration stays empty or carries a footnote, never a Yes.
Results
The office issues a full set of documents by picking an index and a construction, instead of retyping data from three files.
There are dozens of declarations instead of thousands — the unit of conformity is the packaging type, not the price-list item.
A grammage change at the supplier does not alter a document already sent to a customer — verified by a test on an issued data sheet.
A foundation for the target system: the same material and construction data will serve orders, labels and the warehouse.
Technology & integrations
Have a similar process to sort out?
We will show a working prototype in 24 hours, with no strings attached. Tell us what hurts and we will turn it into a system.