New regulations, customer requirements and growing demands for transparency are driving interest in Digital Product Passports (DPP). We’ve had a number of people reach out to Pyx to ask: how do you evaluate the different DPP approaches available?
The passport may be the visible outcome, but there certainly are broader considerations sitting behind it. Here are six questions worth working through before committing to an approach.
1. Can this approach support multiple requirements and multiple markets?
Many organisations begin their DPP journey because of a specific regulatory requirement or customer request. The risk is selecting an approach that solves today’s problem but creates new work every time another reporting, compliance, assurance or market-access requirement emerges.
The more strategic question is whether the same trusted information can be reused across multiple purposes and multiple jurisdictions.
For example, could the same Digital Product Passport support:
- Sustainability reporting
- Market access requirements
- Procurement processes
- Assurance activities
- Product and supply chain transparency initiatives
And could it do so across the different markets in which your organisation operates?
One company can encounter different regulatory obligations, attitudes to data sharing and approaches to digital trust across their supply chain. Questions of sovereignty also come into play. For organisations operating globally, it is worth considering whether they want to subject themselves, their customers and their partners to requirements designed for a particular jurisdiction when operating elsewhere.
The more times information must be recreated, revalidated or reformatted, the greater the cost and complexity. When you’re searching for an approach that works across use cases, you’re actually looking for interoperability — the ability to publish information once and reuse it everywhere it’s needed.
2. What happens if our suppliers, auditors, and certification bodies need to participate?
A DPP is often viewed through the lens of the organisation issuing it. In reality, ecosystems involve a broad group of participants. Suppliers, manufacturers, laboratories, conformity assessment bodies, auditors, scheme owners and industry associations may all contribute information that eventually becomes part of the passport.
The scale can be surprising. One automotive manufacturer recently described supply chains stretching 13 or 14 levels deep. Microsoft has publicly stated that it has around 45 million businesses in its upstream supply chain.
Ideally the approach you decide on can support all of those participants and allow information to move between them efficiently. This is fundamentally a question of scope, and the broader your ecosystem, the more important it becomes.
3. How future-proof is this approach?
Today’s requirements are unlikely to be tomorrow’s requirements. Based on what we’re seeing through our work with the UNTP, the vocabulary of conformity is already expanding beyond sustainability into a broader range of product attributes, certifications and claims.
Trade is digitising and there are lots of moving parts at the moment. It’s not likely to stagnate, meaning new regulations, market requirements and customer expectations will continue to emerge. It’s best to take an approach that is flexible enough to adapt to those changes without requiring significant redesign.
4. What happens if different regions take different paths?
Europe is not the only jurisdiction shaping the future of digital trade. The United States, China and many other jurisdictions are also developing their own approaches to transparency, traceability and digital trust.
As different economic blocs establish their own requirements, businesses may find themselves navigating multiple standards and multiple approaches.
This is where politics enters the equation. Beyond compliance, the challenge is maintaining a coherent approach across a global ecosystem without creating unnecessary complexity and cost.
5. Are the technology choices right for our business?
Every framework contains technology decisions. Some are designed to support policy objectives. Some are designed to simplify implementation. Some reflect the priorities of the organisations that developed them.
Before committing to a particular approach, organisations should ask a simple question: are the technical choices embedded within this model designed for the lowest cost of implementation and maintenance for our business?
The answer may reveal opportunities to take a broader view of the problem.
6. Shouldn’t we be designing our interoperability approach instead of just deciding on a DPP approach?
One of the most useful ways to think about a DPP is as the forward-facing expression of a broader digital trade ecosystem.
Behind it sit:
- Conformity credentials
- Sustainability claims
- Traceability events
- Product identifiers
- Verification services
- Assessment processes
- Trusted issuers
The passport is the visible outcome. The information and trust architecture behind it is where the long-term value is created.
As Zeus puts it:
“If every organisation, regulator and industry develops its own approach to Digital Product Passports, we’ll end up with the same challenge we’ve seen repeatedly in digital trade: fragmented systems that don’t talk to each other.”
The goal is not for every organisation to use the same platform or technology stack. The goal is to ensure that different systems can exchange information in a trusted, verifiable and consistent way.
That is why interoperability protocols matter, and it’s why the UN Transparency Protocol (UNTP) is attracting attention. Organisations can issue DPPs using the UNTP reference implementation, work with DPP providers that are UNTP compliant, or build their own solutions using UNTP protocols. The common factor is that trusted information can be exchanged, verified and reused across ecosystems.
The Five Elements Behind the Questions
While organisations often frame the discussion through practical business questions, Zeus recommends evaluating DPP approaches through five lenses:
- Flexibility
- Sovereignty
- Scope
- Politics
- Technology
Together, these provide a useful framework for assessing whether an approach will continue delivering value as markets, regulations and ecosystems evolve.
What’s interesting is that the more questions you ask, the more you realise the DPP isn’t really the thing you’re choosing.
You’re actually deciding:
- How information moves
- How information is validated
- How information is reused
- How ecosystems participate
- How multiple requirements are served
Which is interoperability.
The DPP may be the immediate requirement. It may even be the catalyst that starts the journey. But the questions organisations find themselves asking are rarely about the passport itself. They are questions about how trusted information is exchanged across organisations, systems, jurisdictions and markets.
That is why the most valuable outcome of a DPP project is the interoperability strategy that sits behind it.
Related Reading
- The Question Everyone Keeps Asking Me About Digital Product Passports
- How Do You Choose the Right DPP Strategy?
Join the Discussion
On the Pyx Trust Architecture community forum: when organisations start talking about DPPs in your sector, what is driving the conversation?
Share your perspective at forum.community.pyx.io.