Surveying SAP Responsible Design and Production

SAP Responsible Design and Production solution is SAP’s new flagship product, whose aim is to help producers manage their Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) obligations and plastic taxes and drive design changes to eliminate waste. Global regulations, EPR schemes and plastic taxes continue to increase worldwide. For instance, plastic taxes are effect in the UK in April 2022 and are expected to come into effect in Italy and Spain in 2023. The EU Green Deal stipulates targets for 70-100% recycling rates by 2030, depending on the material.

The solution capabilities listed in the figure above will help producers comply with the rapidly growing number of Global Regulations, EPR schemes and plastic taxes worldwide. Global obligations are not easily managed by current systems and involve manual data collection. Businesses need to manage costs and design a sustainable portfolio. SAP drives the transition to a circular product portfolio providing RDP solution in order to:

• Increase precision of payments for Extended Producer Responsibility obligations and Plastic Taxes
• Manage down cost of taxes and fees
• Drive growth through redesign to sustainable products
• Simplify reporting of voluntary commitments

SAP Responsible Design and Production is a cloud-native application running on SAP Business Technology Platform.

Please be aware that the list of features and functions above is a Labs Preview and subject to change.

If you are interested to learn more, please consider to visit the following link: SAP Responsible Design and Production

Producers of goods are required to declare how much EPR related packaging was delivered. This information is provided in form of EPR declarations. The entities that receive EPR declarations are producer responsibility organizations (PROs). Producers cooperate with a single or multiple PROs depending on the country/region. SAP Responsible Design and Production makes it possible to generate EPR reports. An EPR report provides the data that can then be entered into an EPR declaration, usually on the PRO's website. For more information, see Country/Region-Specific Reports.

Producers of goods can also cooperate with NGOs that collect packaging data. Cooperation with NGOs is voluntary. NGOs of this kind provide forms where producers need to fill in their packaging data. SAP Responsible Design and Production makes it possible to generate reports that provide the data. This data can then be entered into NGO reports. For more information, see NGO-reports.

To be able to generate reports, business data and configuration data must be available in SAP Responsible Design and Production.

In the default business process for SAP Responsible Design and Production three types of business users are necessary.

This diagram shows the standard process flow for EPR declarations in SAP Responsible Design and Production.

Note: In the software solution, the various end users are grouped into a generic "Reporting", "Packaging Engineer", and "Admin" roles.

SAP Responsible Design and Production facilitates EPR reporting for companies, on a country-by-country basis. One example of a country that requires EPR reporting is the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands, companies producing or importing packaged products have a legal obligation to report the Packaging Waste Management Contribution (PWMC) to the tax authorities. They have Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) to assume recycling responsibility of their products and their products’ packaging after they are disposed by the consumers.

Packaging composition is a concept in SAP Responsible Design & Production that is used to bring together details of packaging elements used to pack a product at different packaging levels (primary, sub-primary, secondary, tertiary). A packaging composition can be assigned to one or more products.