With the rapid expansion of regulations concerning packaging and packaging waste, such as the extended producer responsibility (EPR), and plastic taxes, organizations face the pressing challenge of adapting quickly to remain compliant and competitive.
Since 2021, SAP Responsible Design and Production has been SAP’s solution for calculating EPR fees across markets. At that time, the number of jurisdictions with installed mandatory EPR was around 60. By 2030, that number is expected to grow to 200.
With an evolving regulatory landscape, SAP has implemented new updates within the solution to help ensure that customers can navigate diverse reporting requirements, deadlines, and fees while increasing accuracy, reducing fees and exposure, and improving insights. Read on for updates about recent innovations and how the solution combines enterprise data with information about local and global regulations to help calculate obligations like the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR).
Meet EPR regulations with a flexible, AI-driven, and configurable approach
To date, SAP Responsible Design and Production has supported customers in meeting EPR requirements with out-of-box report categories that are pre-configured based on country. However, the new global regulatory landscape necessitates a more flexible approach.
Enterprises need solutions that enable them to:
- Understand obligations and quickly adapt to new or changing regulations.
- Prepare the data, consolidating from many sources.
- Prepare reports, which requires custom reporting logic based on specific business contexts; reuse of rules and fee structures across similar reporting schemes or producer responsibility organizations (PROs); and calculating EPR fees against shipments and printing the results on invoices to show customers the breakdown between product costs and indirect taxes.
To address these challenges, SAP Responsible Design and Production introduced user-defined reports to help enable customers to design their own sustainability reports, tailoring them to match unique regulatory logic, business context, and compliance requirements.
With new innovations in SAP Responsible Design and Production, users can:
- Structure reports according to the specific rules, PRO requirements, and fee models relevant to their business.
- Precisely narrow down to the packaging and transactional data that is being reported.
- Satisfy complex requirements with multiple dimensions used in report output structure.
- Integrate reports with external and third-party recyclability guidelines assessments.
- Report and comply with the increasing number of PROs that have incorporated eco-modulated ERP fees with eco-modulation grading capabilities.
AI capabilities enhance efficiency and accelerate readiness
The SAP Sustainability portfolio can deliver AI-led operational transformation by capturing sustainability data at the source and embedding intelligence directly into core business processes, thereby enabling continuous improvement at scale. In SAP Responsible Design and Production, two AI cases involving user-defined reports are in beta testing:
SAP Responsible Design and Production, AI-assisted user-defined report explanations
This capability uses AI to analyze and describe how developed extended producer responsibility rules contribute to the assessment results of selected product packaging. During the development of user-defined report categories, EPR report specialists may struggle to understand why a given packaging was categorized in a certain way or not categorized at all. The AI use case is intended to help resolve and simplify an error-prone process by which specialists manually recheck packaging data and reevaluate rules.
SAP Responsible Design and Production, AI-assisted rule creation for user-defined reports
This capability uses AI to translate from regulatory language to system rules, empowering packaging compliance managers to create and validate EPR reporting rules faster and with higher accuracy. The AI use case is intended to help reduce manual effort, avoid costly compliance errors, and accelerate report readiness across markets.
Prepare for future compliance and competitive advantage using AI
The EU PPWR is coming, and most companies aren’t ready. PPWR introduces significant obligations for all economic operators placing packaged goods on the EU market. Brand owners, importers, packaging manufacturers, distributors, and digital marketplaces are all impacted. To mitigate risk and ensure readiness, businesses must take immediate action to assess and adapt packaging materials, data systems, and regulatory reporting.
The detailed packaging data management offered by SAP Responsible Design and Production will help enable organizations to efficiently handle PPWR compliance. With robust data capture and flexible reporting, companies can anticipate regulatory changes and maintain transparency throughout their packaging supply chain.
SAP Responsible Design and Production is working on Article 5 document of compliance capability, recyclability assessments using real product shipment data, so you can assess which changes have the biggest impact. Stay tuned for future announcements from SAP on this topic.
An ERP-centric framework for many business outcomes
By enabling organizations to build reports that align with their changing needs, SAP Responsible Design and Production can ensure that compliance remains agile, scalable, and future-ready. The solution can connect design, production, and regulatory demands to enable organizations to minimize waste, optimize costs, and adhere to global sustainability standards.
Unlike standalone compliance tools, SAP Responsible Design and Production operates within an ERP-centric framework, helping to ensure seamless integration with existing SAP solutions for product master data and transaction data.
Traditional, manually intensive processes are not enough to keep pace with regulations and ensure competitive advantage by unlocking data insights. One SAP Responsible Design and Production customer recently confirmed that using the solution was four times faster and less expensive than manual processes with a spreadsheet or using consultants.
With SAP Responsible Design and Production, your organization can be empowered to respond swiftly and confidently to regulatory changes, working to ensure compliance while freeing your teams to focus on business impact that matters.
Listen to the recent webinar recording to discover how businesses can address upcoming PPWR requirements with SAP solutions.
Learn more about user-defined report capabilities here or request a demo of SAP Responsible Design and Production. Read these customer stories:
- Adam Foods: Baking data visibility into sustainable packaging
- González Byass: Adopting a full-bodied approach to the circular economy
Gunther Rothermel is chief product officer for SAP Sustainability.
