A practical Sunrise 2027 readiness checklist

Sunrise 2027 conversations tend to start abstract and stay there. Here is the concrete version, ordered by what blocks what.

1. Confirm your GTIN assignments are current. Everything downstream inherits errors here, and a surprising number of catalogues contain retired or duplicated identifiers.

2. Decide your resolver domain. This is a long-lived commitment printed on physical goods, so it should not be a subdomain you might retire.

3. Validate check digits across the whole catalogue before you print anything. A mod-10 pass over a spreadsheet takes minutes and prevents a whole class of expensive reprints.

4. Choose your identifier depth per product line. GTIN alone is enough for many products, lot-level is required for anything with recall exposure, and serialisation is a real operational cost that should be a deliberate choice.

5. Pilot on one SKU family. Not one product, one family, so you exercise the batch generation and activation flow rather than a single happy path.

6. Retrofit existing inventory with overlay labels. Goods already in the channel will still be there in 2027, and they will need to resolve.

7. Instrument scans from day one. Scan volume by region is the earliest signal you will get about whether the rollout is working.

8. Write down who owns the destination content. Recall status and allergen data go stale, and stale data behind a compliant code is worse than no code.