The Digital Product Passport will soon be mandatory for most products on the EU market. Learn what it means and how to prepare your product data in time.
Product passport requirements will not come into force for all products at the same time. They will take effect one product group at a time, as a more detailed regulation, known as a delegated act, is created for each product group under the Ecodesign Regulation. The Ecodesign Regulation defines the legal obligations and functional requirements for the Digital Product Passport that companies must meet, while the product passport standards developed by the European standardisation organisations (CEN & CENELEC) describe how these requirements can be implemented in practice.
Why start planning now, even if the deadline feels far away?
It’s important to remember that the Digital Product Passport itself is a tool for sharing product information efficiently, not the source of the data. The biggest risks and challenges are therefore not related to the final technical implementation of the product passport, but to whether the required product information is available at all, in a consistent format and up to date.
Many companies will recognise the situation: items are missing information, the same product exists in several versions across different systems, and some of the information is outdated or simply wrong. If your item data has gaps like these, it’s worth starting to fix them in good time, so that the information is ready and reliable when the product passport requirements come into force in your industry. Master data is the foundation on which the entire product passport ultimately rests, no matter how good the chosen technical implementation is.
The foundation is built by making sure the company knows:
• What the obligation covers and what data is already available: which of the company’s products fall within the scope of the product passport, where the related data is located and where any missing data can be obtained.
• What its own role and responsibility in the value chain are: are you a manufacturer, an importer or, for example, a repairer? Your role determines which party is ultimately responsible for the product passport information.
• What the current system architecture looks like, what existing capabilities there are for the technical implementation, and what the future roles and responsibilities related to the product passport will be.
Building a successful product passport solution requires proactive preparation, so that the minimum requirements can be met and, in the long run, the product passport creates business value rather than just costs.
In practice, the first step is mapping the current state. When a company knows what product information exists, where it is located, how good its quality is and which pieces are missing compared to what the product passport is likely to require, meeting future requirements becomes much easier. At Neuvolab, we help you with this groundwork!