Product certificate service for Leroy Merlin

Our service supports the Leroy certificate database in Russia and Kazakhstan. It is used by all the Leroy Merlin staff who purchase goods, alongside the sales floor workers.

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What certificates we are talking about

Approvals are official documents that are drawn-up for the legal sale and manufacture of various product types. They confirm that the products are safe and comply with the current legal requirements.

All in all, there are about twenty types of approvals: An EAC (Eurasian Economic Union) declaration, EAC certificate, state registration certificate, user manual, TR RF declaration and certificate on fire safety, phytosanitary certificate, and others.

Adding a certificate

Certificates reach Leroy via several ways:

1. Ether a supplier uploads the certificates to QMS – a single certificate database,
2. Or they email the certificates, and the purchase specialist adds them to the base themselves.

All certificates, regardless of the means by which they were added to the service, proceed to validation. The first step is automatic validation — by PDF format and size (not exceeding 20 MB).

Local and import certificates are additionally checked by the quality assurance department, and only then become available to users.

After the validation, a staff member locates the certificate in the database and binds it to the stock-keeping units. They can select the properties of the approval: by application scope, by certificate type, and by placement type.

All certificates, includin those already validated and those in the queue, are stored on the Yandex cloud.

Here’s a simplified overview:

1. Certificates are either downloaded from QMS or manually (if the document was received by email),
2. Format and size are validated automatically, and then checked by quality assurance,
3. An employee binds the certificate file to the SKU,
4. The file gets stored on the Yandex cloud. 

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Working with the certificate database

The certificate database has an expanded filter for convenient searching:

1. By LM code (internal product code),
2. By supplier,
3. By purchase specialist in charge,
4. By division/subdivision,
5. Certificate list review with the certificate types, validity terms, validation status.

Compulsory and expired certificates

The service has a system of certificate expiration and missing approval notification. In the reports, using the specified filters, an employee can view such certificates, and using this data they can halt the purchase or sale of the goods.

If the employee selects an article without a certificate, they’ll see a note stating that the document is missing, though it’s compulsory.

If mandatory certification is not needed, it will also be stated in the respective line.

For mandatory approvals, the ADEO Risk Atlas has been created. It describes which approvals are required for a specific product. Hence an employee now no longer has to request all types of documents from each supplier, only the necessary ones, making suppliers' lives much easier.

Providing certificates at customers’ request

In Leroy Merlin shops, any customer is entitled to request documents confirming goods' certification in accordance with the law.

To find the required certificates quickly or open them for demonstration or for printing, the employees utilize this service. It provides a convenient function to search by different parameters: name, internal code, barcode, and certificate number.

All information on a certificate is stored in one place; a specialist can easily open a certificate without downloading it; download and print a certificate; check its validity period, type, and requirements.

Ultimately, we’ve created a certificate service that:

1. Stores approvals with classification by categories and document types on a centralized basis,
2. Grants quick access to new certificates from suppliers, thanks to the QMS system integration,
3. Enables a convenient certificate search by several parameters at once,
4. Tracks the list of legally required product certificates and manages the documents’ validity terms.