Route assessment

A route assessment is a written statement, produced before any sample is shipped, of which legislation applies to a product in a target market, what document it will end up holding, what evidence that document needs, in what order the evidence has to be produced, and where the schedule risk sits. It is the cheapest stage of a certification project and it is the stage that sets the cost of every stage after it, because testing to the wrong standard, applying to a body without the right accreditation and discovering a local representative is mandatory are all decided here, on paper, and all expensive to reverse later.

Four questions, and each one has a wrong answer that costs money

Which legislation applies. Rarely one piece. A mains-powered device with a radio module is assessed under the radio legislation, which absorbs the safety and electromagnetic requirements; the same device without the radio is assessed under two separate directives with different evidence. Which of those a product is decides the test plan, and it is a question about the bill of materials rather than about the market.

What document you end up with. A certificate from a third party and a declaration you sign yourself are different projects with different costs, and the choice is usually not yours — it is set by the product’s category within the regulation. The most common misreading is to assume the cheaper route because the product feels low-risk.

What evidence is required, and from whom. Accreditation is per standard and per laboratory, not general. A report from an excellent laboratory that is not accredited for that standard, or is not recognised by the destination, is refused, and the samples are shipped again.

Whether someone has to be established locally. The European Union, the United Kingdom, the Eurasian Economic Union and Brazil each require a party established in the territory to be named in the documentation. This is a recurring annual cost rather than a one-off and it is the item most often absent from a first estimate.

Sequence is the part that cannot be retrofitted

Where a product is going to several markets, the order in which the evidence is produced decides whether one test campaign supports all of them or whether each market pays for its own. Markets that reference the same underlying standards can often be served by a single campaign at a laboratory whose reports they all accept — but only if the campaign was specified that way at the start.

Retrofitting a second market onto testing already completed rarely achieves the same saving. The reports exist, they were scoped for one destination, and the gaps are exactly the clauses the second destination cares about. That is why the assessment covers every intended market at once even where only the first one is being funded.

The other sequencing trap is the factory audit. Schemes that require an audit of the manufacturing site — and several do — turn a project measured in weeks into one measured in months, and the audit cannot be compressed by paying more. It is visible at this stage and invisible later.

What comes back, and what it is for

The output is a document, not a conversation: the applicable legislation named, the document type, the evidence list, the sequence, the schedule risks, and an itemised quotation against it. It is deliberately written to be forwarded internally, because the person who commissions it is usually not the person who has to defend the budget for it.

It also names what is not needed. A scope determination that removes a directive, or establishes that a product is outside a regulated category, is a common outcome and the most valuable one, because it removes a test campaign rather than planning one.

What the assessment decides, and what it costs to decide late

Every row in the right-hand column is money spent twice rather than money spent late. That is the whole argument for the stage: it is a small fraction of the project cost and it is what stops the large fractions being repeated.