The product compliance data problem.
You know the data exists somewhere: in a supplier’s inbox, a colleague’s spreadsheet, a PDF on a shared drive. The problem is that you cannot see it, collecting it takes weeks, and by the time you have it, something has already changed. This paper is about that problem, and why it gets harder with every new rule.
A familiar week
A retailer asks for the recycled content of a best-selling chair by Friday. You know you answered something similar last year, but not where it went. The supplier contact has changed. The spreadsheet you find has three versions, and nobody can say which certificate goes with which component. You send the emails, make the calls, and on Thursday afternoon a reply arrives in a different format from the one you asked for.
None of this is anybody’s fault. It is what happens when product data lives in many places and nobody can see all of it at once.
- Could you list, today, which of your products are missing an EUDR geolocation or a valid REACH declaration?
- Do you know which supplier certificates expire in the next 90 days?
- If a supplier changed a material last month, would you know which products it affects?
- How many people in your company emailed the same supplier for the same information this year?
If any of these takes more than a few minutes to answer, the problem below is yours too.
Problem one: you cannot see what you have
Most teams have no single view of their product data. Information sits with design, procurement, quality, sustainability and the suppliers themselves, each in their own tools and folders. So the basic questions, what do we have, what is missing, what is out of date, cannot be answered without a manual search.
- You cannot tell which products are ready for a regulation and which are not until you start the filing
- Documents exist, but nobody knows which product, component or batch they actually cover
- Expiry dates are tracked in someone’s calendar, if at all
- Management asks for status and gets an estimate, not an answer
Sound familiar? “We have that somewhere” is the most common answer to a data request.
Problem two: collecting data is slow and manual
Product facts sit with suppliers, often two or three tiers away. Getting them means emails, phone calls, chat messages and shared folders, repeated for every new request. Suppliers receive the same question from several of your teams in different formats, and answer each one slightly differently.
- Requests are unclear, so answers come back incomplete or in the wrong unit
- Chasing late suppliers takes more time than reviewing what they send
- Upstream data, such as plot origin or substance content, needs your supplier to ask their supplier, and the trail goes cold
- Every answer arrives as a file to be retyped, not as data you can use
Sound familiar? Your team spends more time chasing than checking.
Problem three: data goes stale the moment you collect it
Products are not static. Materials change between seasons, suppliers are replaced, certificates expire and regulations add new data points. A file collected in March may be wrong by June, and nothing tells you. So the next request starts from zero, and the cycle repeats.
- A material change reaches compliance weeks later, if at all
- The same product carries different figures on the website, in the tender and in the filing
- Nobody is notified when a certificate lapses or a supplier updates a declaration
- Each new regulation triggers a new round of collection for data you largely already had
Sound familiar? Every filing feels like the first one.
Why more tools make it worse
ESPR and the Digital Product Passport, EUDR, PPWR, GPSR and CSRD each ask for product-level evidence. The natural response is a tool per rule. But each tool keeps its own copy of the same product data, collected separately, updated separately and reconciled by hand. Visibility gets worse, collection is duplicated and every copy goes stale on its own timeline. Under the EU rules on environmental claims, a figure you cannot trace to its source is also a liability.
What changes with one governed record
- Visibility: one view of every product, component and supplier, showing what is complete, missing or expiring
- Collection: one structured request per supplier, built from the BOM, with automatic reminders and answers that land straight on the record
- Updates: when a material, supplier or certificate changes, the record updates once and every product, filing and passport that depends on it follows
- Reuse: each fact is collected once and used for DPP, EUDR, PPWR, LCA, reports and sales, with its source kept