A redesigned certificate management experience brings certificates, sites, partner responses and lifecycle activities into one workspace.
For automotive companies, exchanging a certificate is only one step in a much larger process and Catena-X demands more transparency.
Certificates need to be maintained across sites and business partners. Expiry dates must be monitored, published certificates tracked and OEM responses answered. Rejections must be understood and corrected. And as the number of certificates and sites grows, so does the operational effort behind them.
Connect & Integrate from T-Systems is therefore taking a major step forward in certificate management within the Catena-X landscape.
The application is evolving from a solution focused primarily on exchanging certificates through Catena-X into an enterprise-ready Certificate Control System designed around the daily work of business users while keeping the Catena-X workflows at its core.
The objective is simple: to provide one action-oriented place to understand what certificates you have, where they apply, what has been shared, how partners have responded and where action is required.
Certificate exchange standards are only the beginning
Catena-X provides the standards and infrastructure required to exchange company certificates between business partners. Connect & Integrate already supports this process and has successfully introduced AI-assisted preparation already in production across hundreds of customers to reduce the manual work involved in turning certificate documents into structured Catena-X data.
But for companies managing larger certificate portfolios, the challenge goes beyond publishing a certificate.
A business user may need to answer questions such as:
- Which certificates are approaching expiry?
- Which sites are covered?
- Has a certificate been shared with the correct partners?
- Has the OEM accepted or rejected it?
- Why was a particular site rejected?
- And which issue requires attention today?
Getting these answers should not require switching between different systems, spreadsheets and technical messages.
That is at the heart of the redesigned Certificate Management experience in Connect & Integrate: bringing certificate operations together and translating the underlying data exchange into information business users can act on.
One cockpit for day-to-day certificate operations
The new experience starts with a central certificate management cockpit.
Instead of opening the application and searching for individual records, business users receive an immediate overview of their certificate landscape and the activities requiring attention.
The operations dashboard brings together certificate inventory, lifecycle information, requests, partner feedback and urgent actions. Users can quickly distinguish between valid certificates and those that are expired or approaching expiry and move directly from an overview into the underlying certificate.
Image 1. The cockpit: certificate landscape and open actions at a glance.
For larger inventories, the redesigned interface introduces familiar business-user interactions such as searching, sorting and filtering. The aim is to make working with certificate records feel closer to the tools users already know (such as Excel), while retaining the advantages of structured Catena-X data exchange.
The result is not simply a new dashboard. It creates a business layer over certificate operations — helping users move from “What data has been exchanged?” to “What needs my attention?”
A certificate and its sites become the centre of the workflow
Managing a certificate effectively requires more than seeing it as a row in an inventory.
The new dedicated certificate view brings together the information surrounding an individual certificate: its details, validity, history and associated sites.
This is particularly important in automotive supply chains, where one certificate can relate to several operational sites. Business users need to understand this relationship without manually correlating information across systems.
Connect & Integrate therefore connects the certificate view with its associated sites, allowing users to navigate between both perspectives within the same workflow.
Users can see which sites are connected to a certificate, access the relevant site information and understand the certificate in the context in which it is actually used.
The goal is simple: one certificate, one place to understand its business context.
Know what your partners have accepted, and what needs action
Publishing a certificate does not mean the process is finished.
The receiving OEM or business partner may accept it, reject it or reject its applicability for a particular site. For suppliers, knowing the current status, and being able to act on it quickly, is of paramount importance to stay compliant and for business continuity.
The new Shared Certificates experience provides a consolidated view of certificates that have been published to business partners and the responses received.
Rather than exposing only the technical exchange, Connect & Integrate correlates partner communication into a business-oriented status at certificate and site level.
Users can see whether a certificate has been accepted or rejected and, where available, inspect the reason for a rejection. This makes it easier to identify an issue, correct the relevant information and take the necessary follow-up action.
Search, sorting and filtering further support teams managing larger numbers of shared certificates and partner relationships.
The underlying exchange remains standardized and technical. The experience presented to the business user does not have to be.
Site-level transparency without leaving certificate management
Sites are a critical part of company certificate management.
A certificate may cover a production plant, office or other organizational site, and the relationship between certificates, sites and business partners needs to remain transparent throughout the process.
The redesigned application introduces a dedicated site-level overview, bringing relevant site information from Cofinity-X into Connect & Integrate.
Business users can access site details, addresses and identifiers such as BPN information directly within the application and move between sites and their associated certificates.
This reduces the need to repeatedly switch between applications simply to understand the context behind a certificate.
For automotive organizations operating across many locations, this becomes increasingly important: certificate management is no longer limited to managing documents; it becomes a way of understanding which certificate applies where and with whom it is being exchanged.
Business simplicity on top, technical transparency as foundation layer
Making certificate management easier for business users does not mean hiding information that may be required for troubleshooting or auditing.
Behind every business status is a series of technical interactions across the Catena-X network. Connect & Integrate therefore separates business usability from technical transparency.
Business users can work with clear certificate, site and partner statuses without having to interpret individual technical messages. At the same time, detailed message logs remain available when deeper investigation or auditing is required.
The technical view provides insight into interactions between OEMs, suppliers and Connect & Integrate, including relevant Catena-X data-model metadata.
This creates two complementary levels of information: a clear operational view for daily certificate management and detailed technical evidence when it is needed.
Designed for enterprise certificate operations
Processes that work for a handful of certificates become difficult when companies need to coordinate growing inventories across multiple sites, legal entities and business partners.
Connect & Integrate is therefore being developed around four enterprise requirements: visibility, operational control, multi-site and multi-partner workflows, and scalability.
The certificate management cockpit creates visibility across inventory and lifecycle activities. Dedicated certificate and site views provide the context needed for daily operations. Shared Certificate views bring partner responses into the same workflow. And technical logs maintain transparency into the underlying exchange.
The broader enterprise direction extends this further with capabilities such as batch processing (coming soon), templates (coming soon), automated pushes (coming soon) and more detailed site-level partner status, supporting the move from individual certificate transactions toward scalable certificate lifecycle management. T
This is the key shift that this new generation of certificate management: from exchanging certificates one by one to controlling certificate operations across the enterprise.
And AI makes the process easier from the start
The new Certificate Management experience also builds on the existing AI capabilities being introduced within Connect & Integrate.
Before a certificate can be managed and exchanged, its information first needs to become structured data. Today, this preparation can involve manually entering and validating more than 15 fields and, for a certificate covering fewer than ten sites, take more than 20 minutes to publish through Catena-X
AI-assisted Certificate Management addresses this initial effort.
Users can upload an existing certificate as a PDF, let AI prepare the relevant metadata according to Catena-X standards, compare the result with the source document and validate it before publishing. The human remains in control of the final data and publishing decision.
Combined with the new Certificate Control System, this creates a much more powerful journey of Prepare with AI → Validate → Share → Track → Manage → Act.
AI helps reduce the effort of getting certificate data into the process. The redesigned application then helps business users' control what happens throughout the certificate lifecycle.
Ready to take control of your certificate operations?
Connect & Integrate combines AI-assisted data preparation with comprehensive certificate management for Catena-X.
Bring a real certificate and your current workflow to a session with the T-Systems team, and see how preparation, inventory, site transparency and partner status come together in one process.
