Tobacco Track and Trace update

The Tobacco Track & Trace team have asked that we share the following information from Dentsu, who are acting as the provider of the EU secondary repository and router. The information contains details of availability of a pre-production/testing environment available during April 2024. This testing environment may be especially useful for any business which is required to report Northern Ireland product movements into the EU system and has not previously done so:

Article 28(6) of the (amended) Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/574 indicates that the provider of the Secondary Repository shall establish:

• A test environment allowing ID issuers, providers operating primary repositories and economic operators to perform quality assurance of their technical solutions and routines before connecting to the repositories system. The test environment shall closely simulate the repositories system.

• A user-acceptance-testing environment allowing ID issuers, providers operating primary repositories and economic operators to perform quality assurance of their technical solutions and routines in anticipation of the next version of the repositories system. The user-acceptance-testing environment shall reflect any planned changes to the repositories system upon their communication in accordance with paragraph 3.

In order to comply with the aforementioned rules, Dentsu intends to deliver an additional environment during the month of April 2024.

Current framework

• Production environment:
o Production

• Public QA environment:
o 1 – Testing the latest version of the repositories system
o 2 – Testing any new versions of the Secondary Repository and Router (when applicable)

New Framework

• Production environment:
o Production

• UAT (User Acceptance Test):
o Testing any new versions of the Secondary Repository and Router (when applicable). As long as no new version is planned, the UAT environment will (logically) run the latest version of the Secondary Repository and Router.

• *NEW* Pre (Test):
o *NEW* Testing the latest version of the repositories system

Please note that the Public QA environment will be renamed to UAT to ease the distinction between environments.

As we draw closer to April, additional communications will be issued with details on the implementation of the new environment framework.