The EU Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) encourages circularity in production processes, pushing for DPPs to track product life cycles and material reuse. In addition, the Waste Framework Directive emphasizes waste reduction, where DPPs help businesses comply by tracking recyclability and recovery of materials. Moreover, the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which came into force in 2023, aims to prevent the import of products linked to deforestation. DPPs can align with EUDR by tracking the origin of materials and providing proof of sustainability, ensuring compliance with environmental standards and preventing illegal, deforestation-linked imports into the EU.
However, implementing DPPs is no simple task. It requires businesses to integrate data from multiple systems, ensure data accuracy, and make this information easily accessible to both consumers and regulatory authorities. As different regulatory frameworks evolve, managing DPPs effectively will become increasingly complex across industries.
The DPP Challenge: Gathering and Exposing Disparate Data Sources
Digital Product Passports require a comprehensive data profile for each product, covering its origin, material composition, sustainability metrics, and instructions for disposal or recycling. This data often resides across multiple systems:
- ERP systems for product specifications and owner history
- PLM or PIM systems for materials and manufacturing data
- IoT systems for real-time usage information
- Customer service systems for warranty and repair history
- Third party services for carbon footprint calculations, sustainability certifications and more
For most organizations, pulling this data together manually is a nightmare. In a recent report from TrusTrace, a key player in DPP transformation for the textile industry, pilot programs with brands like Marimekko and Kappahl highlighted the difficulty of integrating data from different systems into a unified DPP format. Fragmented data not only hampers compliance but also reduces the potential value of DPPs to the business and customers.
Exposing this data is also cumbersome. Amongst other things, ESPR mandates that DPP data is made available in both human-readable formats as well as machine-readable ones. It also states that while end consumers should have access to essential product information, other entities such as government authorities and other regulatory bodies might need access to more sensitive details such as specifics about the manufacturing process, supply chain details or proprietary information around materials. This makes governance of this data very hard.
Occtoo - The Experience Data Platform is built for unifying disparate data, ensuring secure API-driven access, and simplifying the creation of engaging digital experiences. Even though the DPP challenge differs a bit between the different industries, Occtoo is 100% industry agnostic, our flexible data modelling capabilities can cater for any industry. Let me tell you about three ways that Occtoo can help you speed up and secure your DPP initiatives.
Learn more about how you can produce DPPs with Occtoo here.
1. Unify your data
Before DPP data can be distributed or presented to stakeholders, it needs to be unified from the multiple systems where it resides. Occtoo has a very simple ingestion API that allows you to push virtually any data to one or several Occtoo Sources where it will be stored. Occtoo is built ground-up for handling vast amounts of data as is the case with DPP data. With our flexible data model, you can start small and expand as needed with more sources no matter their origins.
Using the Occtoo Card service, you can unify and relate the various sources and set up a custom model, combining individual details such as manufacturing and historical repairs together with the overall product details on carbon footprint and perhaps instructions for product disposal and recycling. You can include media, documents and whatever other assets you want to relate to your model. Occtoo is able to hold data around your products on a very granular level (Product > Variant > SKU > Batch > Individual) that will be needed to build DPPs depending on the regulations in your line of business.
With the data unified, you now have DPP Cards containing a combination of all the data for an individual article.
2. Make the data available
Once you have unified your data, the next crucial step is to make it accessible for consumers, regulators, and other agencies. Through Occtoo’s concept of Destinations, it is amazingly easy to set up different types of APIs for any purpose.
You could deploy a public destination exposing individual products paired with additional public information such as environmental impact and carbon emissions. Really, any data useful for the individual and stipulated by the standards should go into this API. In Occtoo Studio you can easily click and select exactly the data you need from the previously created Cards.
While public APIs are great for consumers, regulatory authorities often require deeper access to product data for compliance purposes. These stakeholders might need detailed insights into the product’s supply chain, manufacturing processes, or even chemical compositions to verify compliance with regulations like the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) or the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). For these types of purposes, you would typically set up an Occtoo Protected Destination with one or more Client IDs for authentication.
By offering secured API endpoints, Occtoo ensures that businesses can safely expose sensitive data without compromising proprietary information. This helps businesses meet regulatory requirements while maintaining control over who can access what data.
Now you have the relevant data exposed and are fulfilling the biggest part of the regulations. DPP data is updated and made available in real-time, ensuring that each DPP remains accurate, relevant, and accessible at any stage of the product lifecycle.
3. Create a digital experience on top of the data
After your data is securely exposed, it is time to focus on creating compelling digital experiences to engage consumers and enhance transparency. One of the primary benefits of the DPP initiative is its potential to educate and empower consumers by making product information accessible in an engaging way. However, as noted in the TrusTrace report, achieving this requires more than just data integration—it calls for intuitive, human-readable formats that communicate complex information clearly and concisely.
This is typically handled through some kind of digital web experience, and it would be easy to think that a link to the product details page (PDP) on the e-commerce solution would be enough, but this would simply not suffice. The reason is that the same SKUs might be of different versions of a product, furthermore, the products could be built in different factories and situated in different countries. Even though the actual product looks and feels the same, the DPP would still differ based on these and other properties. Also, do you really want to bloat your commerce engine or PDPs with all this information that really does not help you boost sales?
What seems to become the standard approach regarding DPPs is to build a simple web application highlighting all the DPP-data in one unified page. Luckily with Occtoo it couldn’t have been any simpler! We have developed an NPM packet called the Occtoo Destination Client that is designed to interact directly with your published Occtoo Destination, it ensures that developers can easily access and work with their data, enhancing productivity and streamlining development workflows. With Occtoo you could build and deploy a custom DPP web application in less than a day!
Ready to Embrace the DPP Future?
As the DPP initiative rolls out across Europe, now is the time for businesses to act. Occtoo’s Experience Data Platform provides a comprehensive solution for managing DPP data, delivering it via custom APIs, and presenting it in user-friendly formats. By partnering with Occtoo, companies can navigate the complexities of DPP compliance and unlock new value in the era of sustainability.
Don’t wait for regulatory deadlines to catch up—get ahead of the curve. Partner with Occtoo to simplify your DPP journey, ensure compliance, and leverage the sustainability era as a competitive advantage. Contact us today to see how we can help you seamlessly manage your DPP data and transform it into a strategic asset, all this without it costing a fortune.