Telden vs manual compliance workflows.
Shared folders. Email chains. Outsourced agencies. Most product safety teams still manage GPSR compliance through a combination of manual processes that were never designed for the job. Here is an honest comparison of where that works, and where it stops working.
The baseline
Where manual processes work.
Manual workflows are not inherently broken. They work well enough in specific circumstances, and adopting software before the pain justifies it is a waste of money.
You have fewer than 30 SKUs and a stable product catalog
Your supplier documentation is already well-organized and complete
You have one person who handles all compliance and that person is not a bottleneck
You sell on one channel with straightforward compliance requirements
Your products are low-risk and compliance obligations are minimal
You have an existing relationship with a compliance agency that handles everything
If this describes your situation, you probably do not need Telden. Keep using what works. Come back when the catalog grows or when someone leaves and the institutional knowledge goes with them.
The breaking points
Where manual processes break.
The problems rarely appear all at once. They accumulate as the catalog grows, the team changes, and the regulatory pressure increases.
Institutional knowledge walks out the door
When the person who 'knows where everything is' leaves, gets sick, or goes on holiday, the team is stranded. Compliance knowledge lives in someone's head, not in a system. Onboarding a replacement takes weeks, if the knowledge can be recovered at all.
Agency dependency becomes a bottleneck
Outsourced compliance agencies handle the work well, until you need to move fast. Turnaround times are measured in weeks. Changes require email threads. You cannot self-serve even simple updates. And the agency holds the canonical version of your compliance records, not you.
No single source of truth
Documents live across email inboxes, shared drives, agency portals, and local folders. When a marketplace asks 'show me the current Declaration of Conformity for SKU X,' nobody can answer with confidence. Multiple versions exist. Nobody is sure which one is approved.
Manual extraction is slow and error-prone
Reading supplier PDFs and re-typing data into spreadsheets, forms, or email templates takes hours. Errors compound silently. A typo in a manufacturer address, a wrong test report reference, a misclassified product category, these only surface when an authority asks.
Per-channel rework multiplies effort
Every marketplace, every webshop, every export format requires a slightly different version of the same compliance data. With manual processes, this means re-creating the output for every channel. Divergence is inevitable. One channel gets updated; the others don't.
Audit response is a fire drill
When a market surveillance authority asks for technical documentation, the clock starts ticking. With manual processes, responding means assembling documents from multiple locations, verifying which versions are current, and building a narrative from scattered records. This takes days, and the result is never as clean as it should be.
Criteria comparison
Head-to-head on 11 criteria.
| Criterion | Manual / Agency | Telden |
|---|---|---|
| Setup cost | Low upfront, uses existing tools | From €49/month, self-serve onboarding |
| Ongoing operational cost | High, hidden in staff time, rework, and agency fees | Predictable monthly cost, reduces manual work |
| Document collection | Email chains, shared drives, local folders, scattered | Centralized upload, fingerprinted, linked to each SKU |
| Data extraction from PDFs | Read PDFs, re-type into forms or files, error-prone | AI extracts warnings, CE data, and compliance fields from documents |
| Source of truth | Unclear, latest version lives in someone's inbox | Single system of record per SKU with full history |
| Review and approval | Ad hoc, via email sign-off or verbal confirmation | Explicit Ready / Review / Blocked states with audit log |
| Gap detection | Only what someone remembers to check | Automatic, missing fields flagged, extraction conflicts detected |
| Agency dependency | High, consultants hold institutional knowledge | Self-serve, your team owns the records and process |
| Multi-channel publishing | Re-create per channel from raw documents | One approved dossier → PDF, CSV, JSON, safety pages |
| Audit readiness | Days of assembly, digging through folders and email | Export dossier on demand with full evidence chain |
| Knowledge continuity | Depends on specific people, leaves with them | Everything is recorded in the system with provenance |
Decision framework
Signals that it's time to move.
You do not need to switch because software exists. You switch when the cost of the current process, in time, risk, and team frustration, exceeds the cost of the tool.
Give your team a system for the work they already do.
Telden gives your team a structured system for the work they are already doing manually. Import your catalog, attach your existing supplier documents, and let the system build the dossiers your manual process was trying to assemble.