Your CRA role for each product
The Cyber Resilience Act does not assign obligations to a company in the abstract: it assigns them to an economic operator in respect of a product. The same company can be the manufacturer of the router it designs, the importer of a module it buys outside the Union, and the distributor of a third product — with different obligations, at the same time. That is why in CRAnotify the role is declared on each Managed Product, not once in the company profile.
The three economic operators
| Role | Who it is |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Whoever develops the product, or has it developed, and places it on the market under their own name or trademark. |
| Importer | Whoever, established in the Union, places on the market a product from a manufacturer in a third country. |
| Distributor | Whoever makes a product available on the market, being neither manufacturer nor importer. |
These three are a closed list. Nothing else is added, because which obligations you are shown depends on this declaration.
Suggested does not mean confirmed
A role can arrive in three ways that have no effect at all: declared at organisation level, imported from a file, suggested by a heuristic. On the product page you will find them under Suggested — not in effect.
A role takes effect only when a person confirms it, and the confirmation records who gave it and when. The reason is simple: showing a distributor the manufacturer's obligations is a mistake the reader has no way of catching. Until you confirm something, CRAnotify shows no role-specific obligation at all — it would rather say nothing than say the wrong thing.
If you declared your organisation's roles under Account area › Company, those roles appear as a suggestion on every new product. They are never confirmed on your behalf: "we are also importers" does not say which product you import.
Closing a role does not erase it
When you stop distributing a product, close the role on its page. From that moment the obligations tied to that role are no longer shown to you, but the history stays: when the role started, when it ended, and who did both. Obligations incurred while you were distributing that product do not disappear because you stopped.
What goes into the register
Every suggestion, confirmation and closure is one row with an author and a date. It is dossier material: before an authority the question is not only "what role did you have", but "from when, until when, and who established it".