How might DPP change your work with managing or communicating product information

Which kind of impact Digital Product Passports (DPP) will have on you who work with product information depends on which kind of technical solution you go for. And if you're into managing the product information or if you use it in some kind of communication.

Let's just be clear on that the introduction of DPP means an upheaval for all things product data:

• The supply of certain product data will become compulsory if you want to sell products for the EU market, either as finished goods or as inputs.

• Many new data types will need to be collected, supplied, and maintained.

• These new data types will be subject to new standards, currently being worked out within the EU standardisation community. No wiggle-room for local or proprietary standards.

In this context, it's worth thinking that the supply of DPP data will be compulsory to be allowed to sell products to consumers in the EU starting with the first industries at the end of 2027. The supply of DPP data will be as much an integral part of physical products as wheels on a car or insulation in a fridge.

Old Style PIM

Traditionally, PIM solutions are variations on the theme of "organise product data in a proprietary system and distribute updates". Whichever system you use, you end up with doing updates based on upstream data and distribute updates downstream, maybe with automation or in a more cumbersome, manual way. The less automatic, the longer, the more tedious and the more risk-prone the operation becomes.

The New Paradigm for Product Data

With the development of systems for handling DPP's, a new paradigm is being introduced by some suppliers. An approach that is closer to the DNS infrastructure managing www-addresses and the servers that hold the data.

This new paradigm is to leave and maintain the data at the source. Each time a downstream user accesses the data it is fetched from the source and the source is verified. This means:

• The data is always the most recent

• Neither maintenance or updates is needed downstream

• No risk of lagging updates, therefore

• The continual verification of data sources ensures quality and reliability

Someone may object that this relies on suppliers upstream keeping their data updated and with unbroken access. Is that at all different from now, we ask? Now you rely not only on them updating the data but also on a system of automatic updating or a process of manual updating, with a lag and a risk of handling errors.

This also means that neither suppliers of data, nor suppliers of product data solutions will be able to lock you into their silos. No "ransom" money to be paid to get access to your data or to the data of your suppliers.

Managing Product Data

If you're into managing product data, you need to watch out not to create unnecessary work for yourself.

• You probably want to avoid creating an entirely separate DPP solution, requiring you to feed and maintain all products all over again, just to hold specific DPP data.

• Nor do you want to get even more locked into suppliers of either systems or data. How about making the introduction of DPP the moment you make a major effort to liberate the data that now becomes an integral part of the physical products you sell for the EU market.

• Shifting to the new paradigm described above would free you from the workload of maintaining incoming data and the associated risks of delays and errors as well as the burden of distributing your updated data downstream.

• You probably will be able to do away with one or many databases too. We've already seen substantial rationalisation of databases by companies piloting such DPP applications.

Using Product Data in Communications

The introduction of Digital Product Passports means that there will be an entirely new genre of data available to communicate. The strict use of that data for Digital Product Passports will be handled by the DPP system, but you will be able to leverage that data for whatever other purposes you can come up with.

• If your DPP shows better "environmental performance" than the competition, you'll have a new argument to use in your marketing, backed up by facts, not only claims!

• If it doesn't you might need to tone down your claims of "being green".

• If your company chooses to leverage the "new paradigm" described above, you will be able to drastically rationalise and improve both quality and timeliness of the data you use in online publishing, for example, while reducing the effort needed to maintain it.

With current, verified product data easily available, the only limit to what you can use it for is your creativity.

Are you ready to handle and leverage an whole new genre of product data? Effectively? Efficiently?

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