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Digital Product Passports are often discussed as a new regulatory requirement.
For industrial companies, however, the harder challenge sits underneath the passport itself: the data.
A Digital Product Passport depends on structured, reliable and maintainable information about the product it represents. That information may come from manufacturers, equipment suppliers, engineering systems, technical documentation, product catalogues and operational platforms.
In asset-intensive industries, much of this information already exists. The problem is that it is often fragmented across PDFs, spreadsheets, supplier submissions and disconnected systems.
This means that preparing for Digital Product Passports is not only a compliance exercise. It is also a product and asset information management challenge.
For a broader introduction to what a DPP is, how the EU framework works and which regulatory requirements apply, see What is a Digital Product Passport (DPP)?.
A Digital Product Passport is only as useful as the information behind it.
For a simple consumer product, that may involve a relatively contained set of product attributes. For industrial equipment, the information landscape is often more complex.
Consider a pump, valve, compressor or instrument supplied to a major industrial facility. Relevant information may include manufacturer and model details, materials, certifications, technical attributes, supplier documentation, operating limits, spare parts information and other lifecycle records.
Those records may already exist, but they are rarely managed as one consistent dataset.
Technical specifications may be stored in supplier datasheets. Certificates may exist as PDFs. Product information may be maintained in an ERP or product catalogue. Once the equipment enters an engineering project, it may also receive a project-specific or owner-specific tag number.
The challenge is therefore not simply creating a Digital Product Passport.
It is establishing a trustworthy data foundation from which the passport can be created and maintained.
Much of the information needed to describe industrial equipment originates with manufacturers and suppliers.
This makes supplier information one of the most important foundations for DPP readiness.
Equipment suppliers may provide product specifications, technical attributes, certificates, material information, manuals and other records. But across a large industrial project, this information can arrive from hundreds of suppliers using different formats, terminology and levels of detail.
One supplier may deliver structured data. Another may provide an Excel spreadsheet. A third may include the same values only inside a PDF datasheet.
The information may technically be available, but that does not mean it is ready for machine-readable exchange.
Effective Supplier Information Management helps address this problem by defining what information suppliers must provide, validating it as it is received and connecting it to the correct equipment or product record.
For DPP readiness, this matters because the quality of the final passport depends on the quality and traceability of its source information.
One of the most important challenges in industrial DPP implementation is identity.
A manufacturer may identify a product using a product code, model number or serial number.
Once that same product is installed in a facility, the owner-operator may identify it using an engineering or equipment tag.
Both identifiers are valid, but they describe the product from different perspectives.
The manufacturer identifier represents what was produced and supplied. The engineering tag represents where that equipment exists within the physical facility and how it relates to other assets and systems.
If those identities remain disconnected, product information can lose its operational context after installation.
For industrial companies, a stronger approach is to maintain the relationship between the original product identity and the installed asset identity.
A governed Master Tag Register can provide this connection by linking equipment tags to supplier information, technical attributes, documents and other associated records.
This allows information received during procurement and project execution to remain connected to the equipment after it becomes an operational asset.
Industrial companies are already accustomed to receiving large volumes of supplier documentation.
The problem is that documents are primarily designed to be read by people.
A technical datasheet may contain the manufacturer, model, materials, performance parameters and operating limits required for a DPP. If those values exist only inside an unstructured PDF, however, they are difficult for digital systems to validate, compare or exchange automatically.
Digital Product Passports reinforce a broader shift in industrial information management: from documents that contain useful data to structured data that can be reliably reused across systems.
This does not mean engineering documents become unnecessary.
Datasheets, manuals, certificates and declarations remain important evidence. But the structured information contained within them needs to be connected to the correct product and asset record.
That connection is what turns a collection of files into usable product information.
A data value can be technically correct and still be difficult to use if its context is unclear.
For example, a material specification or operating limit provides little value if a system cannot determine which equipment item it belongs to, which supplier provided it or whether it applies to the installed configuration.
For DPP-ready industrial information, data therefore needs both quality and context.
Data contextualization connects technical attributes, documents, equipment and identifiers so that information can be interpreted in relation to the physical asset it describes.
This becomes especially important when information moves between manufacturers, EPC contractors, owner-operators and operational systems.
Without preserved relationships, each organization may need to reconstruct the meaning of the data independently.
Digital Product Passports are intended to support information exchange across organizational and system boundaries.
The European DPP framework reflects this through its focus on unique identifiers, interoperability, APIs, data exchange protocols and data storage. The EU DPP Registry became operational in July 2026, alongside the publication of harmonised technical standards supporting this infrastructure. Internasjonal Marked og Næringsliv
For industrial companies, the interoperability challenge is familiar.
Equipment information often needs to move between supplier systems, engineering applications, ERP, project information environments and operational systems.
Technical connectivity alone is not enough. Two systems may be capable of exchanging records while still using different identifiers, classifications or attribute definitions.
This is why governed data structures and common definitions matter.
A DPP strategy should therefore not be treated as an isolated digital initiative. It should connect with the organization's broader approach to engineering and asset data interoperability.
Creating the first version of a Digital Product Passport is only part of the challenge.
The EU framework places responsibility on relevant economic operators to ensure that required DPP information remains accurate throughout the product lifecycle, according to the applicable product legislation. Internasjonal Marked og Næringsliv
That becomes particularly significant for industrial equipment.
A product may remain in service for decades. During that period, it may be inspected, repaired, modified, upgraded or transferred between systems and organizations.
If the information behind the DPP is maintained separately from the systems where those changes are actually managed, the passport risks becoming outdated.
For long-lived equipment, DPP readiness therefore requires a data architecture that supports ongoing governance rather than one-time publication.
The practical question is not simply:
Can we create the passport?
It is:
Can we keep the underlying information accurate and connected throughout the equipment lifecycle?
For industrial organizations, DPP readiness does not necessarily mean creating passports for every equipment item immediately.
It means ensuring that the underlying information can support DPP requirements when they apply.
A DPP-ready information environment should make it possible to identify the product consistently, trace where key data came from, validate required attributes, connect supplier information to the correct equipment and exchange information with other systems without repeatedly rebuilding the dataset.
It should also be clear who owns the data and how changes are governed.
This is fundamentally a Master Data Governance question as much as a technology question.
If product, supplier and equipment information is already structured, governed and connected, adapting it to a DPP schema becomes significantly more manageable than trying to assemble the required information from fragmented records later.
DPP requirements will continue to vary by product group, so organizations should avoid assuming that every industrial product will require the same dataset.
But companies do not need to wait for every final data field before improving their readiness.
A useful starting point is to understand the current information landscape.
Where is product data stored today? Which information comes from suppliers? Which attributes are structured, and which remain inside documents? How are manufacturer identifiers connected to engineering tags? Which system is responsible for maintaining the information after installation?
These questions expose the underlying data gaps long before a DPP implementation begins.
Organizations can then improve supplier requirements, standardize product and equipment information, strengthen data ownership and create clearer relationships between product records, documents and installed assets.
The objective is not to create a parallel DPP database.
It is to ensure that the existing industrial information environment can reliably support the passport.
Sharecat provides a structured environment for collecting, validating, governing and connecting the product and equipment information that Digital Product Passports depend on.
Supplier information can be collected against defined requirements and validated when it enters the project information environment. Product and equipment data can be maintained in structure rather than remaining isolated across supplier files and spreadsheets.
Sharecat also connects this information to tags, documents and related records, preserving the context required to understand how a supplied product relates to an installed asset.
The Master Tag Register provides governed equipment identity and relationships, while Supplier Information Management supports the structured collection and validation of supplier-provided information.
For organizations moving from data readiness to DPP implementation, Sharecat also provides a dedicated Digital Product Passport System for managing structured product information across the supply chain and asset lifecycle. Sharecat positions this around structured product and instance information, tagging, metadata, document relationships and validated data models that can support DPP schemas. Sharecat
The important distinction is that the passport is not the starting point.
The starting point is trusted product and asset information.
When that foundation is structured, validated and connected, Digital Product Passport implementation becomes a natural extension of existing information management rather than another isolated compliance project.
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