Chapter 3 — full chapter
3.1.3 Mandatory, conditional and voluntary data fields
Not every field carries the same weight. Some are mandatory once a delegated act applies, such as fibre composition at model level. Some are conditional, required only for products that make a specific claim as a recycled-content percentage is only meaningful if the product claims recycled content. Others remain voluntary for now, such as item-level serialisation for resale and repair tracking. For an SME planning its data work, this distinction matters more than the total field count: mandatory and conditional fields set the floor a business must clear, while voluntary fields are where early investment can create competitive differentiation, in the same way Coverguard and Fusion Sportswear used voluntary transparency to win business ahead of any legal requirement (see Chapter 1, section 1.3.1).
Sequencing follows naturally from this distinction. A realistic SME data plan clears the mandatory floor first, closes the conditional fields tied to whatever claims the business actually intends to make, and only then decides, deliberately, which voluntary fields are worth the investment given its market position, rather than treating the full field list as one undifferentiated task to be completed in one pass.