Packaging Data

The concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) can be simply put as "producer must pay" for the costs of collection and treatment of products after use. Under existing EPR schemes in many countries worldwide, producers of goods must declare the EPR-relevant volumes of different materials they use in their products and packaging. Depending on the country, there are different reporting and fee structures, and this makes EPR very complex.

The entities that receive EPR declarations are Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs). Producers cooperate with a single or multiple PROs depending on the country/region. One of the features of SAP Responsible Design and Production is the generation of EPR reports. An EPR report provides the data that can then be entered into an EPR declaration, usually on the PRO's website.

To be able to generate EPR reports, business data and configuration data must be available in SAP Responsible Design and Production. The data that is required encompasses configuration data, organization data, customer, product, delivery, packaging elements, and packaging compositions. You can either import data or replicate it using the APIs. This import is done using files in the XLSX file format. For more information, see Data Import Through File Upload and Push Data Replication.

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

Packaging data consists of two components: Packaging elements and packaging compositions. A packaging element defines a component that can be part of the packaging of a product.

A packaging composition defines all the packaging elements that are used together to form the entire set of packaging elements for a product.

For example, foil could be a packaging element and the attributes define that it has a red color, is flexible, and belongs to a certain plastic type, e.g. LDPE. A packaging composition defines that this foil is used as secondary packaging for six bottles of beverage and is valid in the current year, between January and April.