I’ve been getting a few questions about DPPs lately. “What’s the best Digital Product Passport strategy?” “We have to comply with the EU DPP. Should we use that for other regions too?” “Should we build our own?” “Which DPP approach should we choose?”
If you’re operating in Europe, you need to achieve EU DPP compliance. That’s not really up for debate.
But if you’re asking me what DPP approach you should take, I’d suggest there’s a more important question regardless of where you operate.
“How do we share information in a way that it can be trusted and reused across every Digital Product Passport, reporting requirement, market access requirement and buyer request we face?”
Here’s the reframe.
The challenge is sharing information between organisations, systems and markets in a way that can be trusted, verified and reused.
Otherwise you’re creating the same information over and over again.
The Digital Product Passport is just one of the places that information gets used. The same information is often needed for:
- Sustainability reporting
- Product claims
- Certifications
- Supply chain transparency
- Market access requirements
- Customer requests
- Future regulations that haven’t been written yet
If you build your approach around a single passport requirement, then you’re only solving for that one requirement.
However, if you can share trustworthy information in a way that allows it to move between systems and organisations, then supporting a Digital Product Passport becomes one of many things you can do with it.
That’s why my advice is this: if you need EU DPP compliance, achieve EU DPP compliance — but don’t mistake the passport for the strategy.
Build the capability to exchange trusted information first.
Then use that capability to support DPP requirements and whatever comes next.
In practical terms, that means looking at approaches such as the UN Transparency Protocol (UNTP), which is designed to support trusted information exchange across multiple markets and multiple use cases.
Publish Once. Reuse Everywhere.
Trade isn’t getting simpler and transparency requirements aren’t going away. In fact, more will emerge.
The ideal outcome is that you can publish trusted information once and then use it to support Digital Product Passports, certifications, sustainability reporting, product claims, procurement requirements and so on.
The passport is important.
But it’s only one application of a much bigger capability.
Further Reading
- How Do You Choose the Right DPP Strategy?
- How Do I Evaluate DPP Approaches So I Can Choose the Right One?
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.