This initiative promotes sustainability by encouraging the use of eco-friendly materials and processes in battery manufacturing. It also ensures that batteries comply with regulatory standards concerning environmental impact and safety. Moreover, DPPs will facilitate recycling by providing recyclers with detailed information on how to efficiently and safely handle battery components. Using batteries as a test case will illustrate the benefits and challenges of implementing DPPs, showcasing their potential for wider application across various industries.
How to approach implementing DPP for your products
Digital Product Passports will impact manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, consumers, regulators, and recyclers (to name a few!). Each of these industries will need to ensure the accurate sharing and use of product information in compliance with DPP. To be able to successful implement DPP and adhere to these regulations, organisations will need to be able to collect, share, and secure detailed product data, integrating systems for efficient data management and maintaining data accuracy to support transparency and compliance across the supply chain.
That’s where your data management becomes critical.
MDM can support various requirements of the Digital Product Passport, and in a lot of cases, those affected by new DPP regulations will be able to leverage their existing MDM platforms for successful DPP implementation. This process may include adding extra attributes to your products, incorporating additional assets or certificates, and linking products to other entities or breaking them down into component parts. By creating an entity for certificates and linking products to it, you avoid the need to maintain data multiple times, thus enhancing efficiency.
Rather than approaching DPP by building a solution from scratch, it is worth considering enhancing to your existing solution to bring in multi-domain attributes and additional attributions to cover location, batch, and the full history of product data required in DPP.
What does DPP demand?
Irrespective of MDM, we foresee with a high degree of confidence that managing additional attributes and digital assets will be crucial for your products. This includes aspects related to sustainability, product life cycles, and certifications. This includes specific items like certificates and the creation of additional entities such as locations, manufacturing sites, and the journey a product has taken.
Understanding the lowest level components of a product and the manufacturing processes involved is crucial. It’s important that you are mastering manufacturing processes and tracking the journey or transportation of products. These details are necessary to comply with digital product passport requirements, which also demand additional statuses like the current status of each product, and any of its associated assessments, and certificates.
Managing these all of these requirements poses a risk of data duplication and complexity. It's clear that while MDM can support some of these requirements, additional technology solutions will be necessary to fully optimise the management of these attributes and digital assets. For example, a few key points highlighting DPP’s requirements, that MDM can facilitate are:
- Additional attribution: Managing extra master data details about products which now must be form part of the accessible information on the digital product passport.
- Additional assets: Mastering of key assessments, certifications and other related documents and the products to which they relate.
- Additional entities: Incorporating locations, manufacturing sites, components, and processes undertaken.
- Additional Statuses: Tracking assessments performed, compliance status, recyclability status, certificates, etc.
"The ability to collect and provide data”
Underlying the core digital product passport principles, one overarching requirement is "the ability to collect and provide data”. The data requirements forming part of the DPP regulations are set to vary by product category and type, but fundamentally MDM solutions enable definition of data schemas according to product family, type, hierarchies, and so on. These are usually extensible to incorporate new attribution requirements as they emerge. Many of the specific DPP requirements are likely to be consistent across product families too. For instance, in the test use case of batteries, attributes such as the percentage of recycled materials, durability, recycling guidelines, and carbon footprint are often required. Rather than facing the overwhelming task of defining models for every type of product, an effective MDM solution enables models and attribution to be defined centrally and made reusable wherever possible, achieving efficiencies while still allowing for variation where needed.
So what does all of this mean for organisations?
As with most new regulations, it’s likely you just want to know how it’s going to impact your organisation, and how you should be approaching it. I’ve pulled out a few key areas below.
⭐ Data Collection: Breaking down products and understanding lineage
Implementing DPPs brings several changes in how product data is managed and shared within an organisation. A key requirement is data collection. In order to comply, organisations must be able to break down products to their lowest level constituent parts and understand their lineage. MDM’s hierarchical and relational functionality supports this need, allowing for detailed tracking and management of components and their interrelationships.
Many businesses may already have their products mastered within their systems to some extent. However, MDM solutions offer extensible data models that can create and link additional entities, such as components, bills of materials (BOMs), and bundles. This flexibility enables organisations to adapt their data models to meet the detailed requirements of a DPP, ensuring comprehensive and accurate collection and management of product data.
⭐ Data Collection: Complete product lifecycle awareness
Data collection is essential for understanding and managing the full product lifecycle, from initiation to disposal. Detailed data is crucial during the maintenance and repair phases to track product performance and condition over time. Equally important is recycling data, which provides insights into end-of-life processes and the potential for material recovery.
While some of this data is more transactional in its nature, the ability to define workflows within MDM solutions plays a pivotal role in managing those elements which can be considered master data – for example a product’s manufacturing journey and constituent parts, its repair or servicing options, or its recyclability characteristics. These workflows can be customised to capture specific lifecycle stages and the associated data points, ensuring that all relevant information is collected and maintained. The flexibility of data models within these systems allows organisations to adapt their data structures to accommodate diverse lifecycle requirements, from initial production to final disposal.
Understanding the environmental impact of a product, through the use of data is becoming increasingly expected. Detailed tracking of data related to carbon footprint, material recyclability, and overall environmental impact is crucial for sustainability initiatives. By leveraging advanced data models and workflows, organisations can not only track these metrics but also identify opportunities for reducing environmental impact.
Initiatives such as re-use and recycling are bolstered by comprehensive data collection and management. Accurate and detailed data enable organisations to implement and monitor programmes that extend product lifecycles and enhance sustainability. Integrating these initiatives within the data management framework ensures that businesses not only comply with environmental regulations but also contribute positively to sustainability goals.
⭐ Data Collection: Traceability and tracking mechanisms
DPP dictates that tracking and linking of an individual product with its associated lifecycle data should be possible through technologies such as RFID, QR codes, and barcodes. These tools enable real time tracking and immediate visibility of a product’s journey and characteristics from initiation through to disposal.
While only one input, MDM solutions will play a vital role by storing the master data components that must be surfaced through these tracking mechanisms. Traditional MDM principles apply, meaning that data is of the highest possible integrity and accuracy, underpinned by validation rules and governed data management processes before reaching its end consumer. Furthermore, solutions can link products together and form relationships based on key properties, facilitating comprehensive lifecycle management and traceability.
⭐ Data Accuracy: The importance of governance
Effective governance is crucial for ensuring data accuracy and reliability. By defining workflows to control processes, organisations can ensure that the right data is captured at key points, providing audit traceability throughout the product lifecycle.
MDM solutions provide a practical tool to enable the tracking and monitoring of data completeness and compliance with ESG and DPP requirements that relate to quality product master data, utilising completeness metrics and workflows. These capabilities allow organisations to identify gaps easily and take appropriate action, providing a basis for comprehensive and accurate master data.
⭐ Data Accuracy: Single source of truth for enhanced efficiency
Ensuring data accuracy involves maintaining a trusted single version of truth for each product, eliminating the risk of multiple versions and preserving full traceability. This is also of equal importance for other reference data domains when it comes to Digital Product Passport too – for example location or product manufacturing data.
MDM solutions facilitate this through application of data quality rules, governance processes, and where relevant, defining matching and merging processes for duplicate data records. Further to this, where a product or component may be sourced from multiple suppliers, ‘buy-side’ records can be linked, persevering full traceability of data while still only maintaining one ‘sell-side’ product record visible to the end customer.
Additionally, this approach helps avoid duplication of effort and repetition of information, reducing the opportunity for errors. Managing data once, in compliance with DPP requirements, streamlines processes and enhances efficiency across the organisation.
⭐ Seamless integration and data accessibility using MDM
Ease of integration is at the heart of MDM and what it already aims to do. Implementing DPPs necessitates the availability of detailed and accurate product master data surfacing this alongside other, often more transactional data about a product and its lifecycle. MDM solutions provide various mechanisms, tools, and formats to make this data accessible to other channels, systems, or third parties in the required way. When implemented effectively, this can ensure that all stakeholders, including suppliers, customers, and regulators, can access the necessary product information efficiently and securely. The flexibility of MDM systems supports seamless data integration, facilitating comprehensive data management and distribution across the organisation including for DPP purposes.
How can you leverage MDM solutions for an efficient DPP implementation?
Increasingly, MDM software vendors are developing out-of-the-box templates that address some of the specific requirements for implementing DPPs. These templates provide a solid foundation for managing DPP specific product data, expanding models to include new entities and attribution which can be related and managed through workflows and to help make the right data readily available. One example is the emergence of solutions to manage product certifications, as well as integrate with third-party certification agencies to allow automatic synchronisation of this data. This integration helps keep product certificate information up-to-date and compliant with relevant industry standards, reducing the risk of errors and saving valuable time.
Additionally, MDM solutions facilitate seamless integration with metadata solutions. Metadata plays a crucial role in organising and categorising product data, enhancing searchability and overall data quality. By integrating metadata solutions with MDM systems, organisations can ensure that their product data is properly tagged and classified, making it easier for internal teams and customers to find the information they need. This can be helpful when implementing DPP solutions to understand what master data already exists and where it is held.
When evaluating MDM software options for DPP implementation, it can be useful to consider the breadth and depth of the vendor's pre-built templates and their integration capabilities. A comprehensive MDM solution may well offer templates or approaches that already cover some of the more generic product data scenarios for DPP enablement, and all should offer the flexibility to integrate master data with critical third-party systems. By choosing a vendor that excels in these areas, organisations can accelerate their implementation timeline and start realising the benefits of centralised product data management sooner, ultimately supporting the successful adoption of DPPs.
Want to learn more about Digital Product Passports and how they can transform your approach to sustainability and regulatory compliance? Download our checklist guide 'How MDM can support DPP compliance' below. Equip yourself with the knowledge and tools to stay ahead in the evolving regulations.
