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Most products don’t fail because they’re broken; they fail because information is missing. Digital Product Passports change this by preserving critical data about how products are made, used, repaired, and reused, making all impacts visible with a single scan.
A Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a structured digital record that documents the essential characteristics of a product throughout its lifecycle. Beyond a QR code, a DPP serves as a product’s digital identity, enabling transparency, traceability, and sustainability.
This guide categorises the three essential layers of DPP data you need to collect to satisfy EU regulators and eco-conscious consumers.
A Digital Product Passport only becomes powerful when it captures the right data, at the right time, with the right proof. That’s why DPP data is best structured in three layers:
Static Data — “What it is.”
The unchanging identity card of the battery/product.
This is the foundational data created at design/manufacture time and used as the single source of truth.
Dynamic Data — “What happens to it?”
The living timeline of the battery/product across its lifecycle.
This layer evolves as the battery moves, operates, gets serviced, reused, or recycled.
Compliance Data — “How we prove it.”
The evidence layer that turns claims into trust.
It connects the passport to verifiable proof for regulations, audits, and customer assurance.
Together, these three layers turn a DPP from a “data document” into a digital system of record for transparency, traceability, and compliance.
The 3 Layers of DPP Data — Explained
A Digital Product Passport is most impactful when it reads like a story:
Who is it? → What is it made of? → What has happened to it (and what should happen next)?
This layer answers: “Exactly which product is this?”
It’s the non-negotiable foundation that makes everything else reliable.
Why it matters: Layer 1 prevents mix-ups. It ensures the DPP is tied to the right item—every time.
This layer answers: “What’s inside—and what risks or value does it carry?”
It’s where sustainability becomes measurable, not marketing.
Why it matters: Layer 2 turns the passport into a materials intelligence system—supporting compliance, circularity, and safer products.
This layer answers: “What happened to this product over time?”
It transforms the DPP from a document into a living record.
Why it matters: Layer 3 enables circular economy outcomes—repair, reuse, resale, and responsible recycling—based on real evidence.
A Digital Product Passport (DPP) isn’t a single, fully public “product profile.” It’s better to think of it as a layered record, where different audiences can see different slices of information. This permission model matters because a DPP often contains a mix of consumer-friendly facts, compliance evidence, and commercially sensitive data.
Public Access
This is the layer designed for customers, recyclers, and anyone scanning a QR code on a product. It typically includes high-level, non-sensitive information that helps people use, repair, and dispose of the product responsibly—for example: basic product identity, materials summaries, care instructions, repair guidance, and end-of-life handling. Public access builds trust, but it should avoid exposing supplier secrets or security-relevant details.
Regulatory Access
Regulators may need deeper visibility to verify claims and enforce compliance. This layer usually contains auditable proof: conformity documents, test results, certification references, sustainability claims and how they’re calculated, and traceability evidence across the value chain. The goal here isn’t marketing—it’s verification. Regulatory access should be robust, time-stamped, and tamper-evident, with clear data provenance (where the data came from and who signed off).
Restricted Access
Some information is essential for operations but too sensitive to share broadly—think supplier pricing, full bills of materials, exact sourcing locations, or detailed manufacturing parameters. Restricted access is typically reserved for specific partners (e.g., authorised repair networks, brand teams, selected recyclers) under contractual controls. This layer is where DPPs become truly powerful for circularity—enabling repair and recovery—without exposing intellectual property or competitive advantage.
In practice, a well-designed DPP uses role-based permissions so the same passport can serve everyone—from consumers to auditors—while keeping sensitive data protected.
A Digital Product Passport (DPP) is only as reliable as the data feeding it—and that’s where most teams hit the real challenge. DPP data doesn’t live in one place. It’s spread across internal systems, external partners, and different formats, owners, and levels of quality. Building a DPP is less about creating a “new database” and more about connecting an ecosystem and deciding what becomes the single source of truth for each data element.
ERP Systems (SAP, Oracle): batch and manufacturing reality
Your ERP is often where the “as-built” story lives: production batches, manufacturing dates, plant/site identifiers, lot/serial tracking, quality events, and, in some cases, process or compliance attributes. For DPP purposes, ERP becomes critical because it reflects what actually happened—not just what was planned. The challenge is that ERP data can be highly structured but also highly customised, and mapping it cleanly to DPP fields takes deliberate governance.
PLM Systems (e.g., Teamcenter): design intent and BOM truth
PLM typically holds the “as-designed” view: product structure, engineering BOM (eBOM), material specifications, change history, and design documentation. This is where you find the details needed to explain what a product is made of and how it should be repaired or disassembled. The integration gap here is common: PLM data may be rich, but not always aligned with what manufacturing actually built—or how components are identified downstream. Reconciling PLM (design) with ERP (execution) is often the backbone of a trustworthy DPP.
Supplier Inputs (Portals): origin and upstream traceability
Some of the most important DPP fields—like raw material origin, recycled content claims, restricted substance declarations, and supplier certifications—sit outside your enterprise systems entirely. That means supplier portals, data exchanges, or onboarding workflows become the pipeline for upstream information. The hard part isn’t just collecting it; it’s standardising it (same units, same definitions, same evidence) and ensuring it can be updated when suppliers change sources or processes.
In short: DPP data comes from a connected network of ERP + PLM + suppliers—and the integration challenge is making that network consistent, verifiable, and maintainable over time.
Individually, ERP, PLM, and supplier systems are powerful. Collectively, they are fragmented. Each was designed for a specific purpose, with its own data model, ownership, and update cycle—and none of them were built with Digital Product Passports in mind.
The result is a disconnect between what was designed, what was built, and what suppliers claim. Data is duplicated, reconciled manually, or stitched together in reports that break as soon as something changes. Even when integrations exist, they’re often point-to-point, brittle, and optimised for internal efficiency—not cross-ecosystem transparency.
This gap is why DPP initiatives stall. Not because the data doesn’t exist, but because it isn’t aligned, synchronised, or governed across systems. Closing the gap requires a unifying layer—one that can translate between systems, manage versions over time, and expose the right data to the right audience without forcing every platform to change how it works.
In other words, the hardest part of DPPs isn’t data capture. It’s data coherence.
The core problem with Digital Product Passports isn’t that the data doesn’t exist—it’s that it’s scattered. Design details sit in PLM, manufacturing reality sits in ERP, and the upstream proof (origin, declarations, certificates) sits with suppliers. DigiProd Pass positions itself as the layer that pulls these strands into one passport view, without pretending it can replace everything that came before.
In practice, that means it needs to handle messy inputs as well as “ideal” integrations. Some information can be connected from enterprise systems; other parts will still arrive through supplier submissions or structured forms. The point isn’t perfection—it’s creating a consistent place where each data element has a home, a source, and a level of access.
It also treats access as part of the architecture, not an afterthought. A DPP has to serve different audiences—customers, repair networks, compliance teams, regulators—without exposing everything to everyone. Centralising the information only works if it’s paired with a permission model that makes the passport usable and safe.
The outcome is less about a shiny dashboard and more about coherence: one product record, stitched across systems and partners, that can actually be kept up to date as products move through manufacturing, sale, repair, resale, and end-of-life.
Digital Product Passports force a shift in mindset. They don’t just ask whether you have the data; they expose whether your data is usable, trustworthy, and maintained over time. That’s why the most effective DPP efforts treat data not as exhaust from other systems, but as a product in its own right.
Treating data as a product means being clear about ownership, quality, and purpose. Each data element needs a defined source, a reason to exist, and an audience it serves. It also means accepting that data evolves: designs change, suppliers switch, products are repaired, reused, or recycled. A passport that can’t reflect those changes quickly loses value.
Ultimately, Digital Product Passports aren’t a compliance checkbox or a one-off IT project. They’re a test of how well an organisation can manage information across its ecosystem. Get that right, and the passport becomes more than a requirement—it becomes infrastructure for transparency, circularity, and trust.
Sources
Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation
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