Surveying SAP Responsible Design and Production

Sustainability Managers are responsible for creating KPIs and various sustainability reports. With a growing number of companies embracing ESG (environment, social, and governance) targets, it’s crucial to ensure access to good quality data and analytical capabilities to understand areas of focus against voluntary commitments and corporate goals.

Brand Managers and Packaging Engineers are responsible for developing packaging, working on the replacement of certain packaging material if it doesn’t comply with the company’s strategy. They create and maintain packaging specifications to this effect.

Compliance/EPR Managers (or EPR experts) are responsible for ensuring the correctness of data that contribute to Extended Producer Responsibility reports, as well as for preparing such reports in time for the PRO deadlines. The SAP Responsible Design and Production solution will enable early detection of data issues, prescribe corrective actions for such issues and provide analytical capabilities to allow Compliance/EPR Managers to drill down to any level of detail across different dimensions of choice.

The role of the tax manager in a business is to accurately calculate and pay taxes. In the context of SAP Responsible Design and Production, they will be concerned with taxes on plastic packaging. SAP Responsible Design and Production can calculate plastic packaging for customers directly, using the information about material used in the packaging composition, and shipment data.

Data and Reporting Managers are responsible for configuration and setup of software applications and availability of consistent data across multi-system landscape. This will enable IT or Data Admin to easily manage data coming from heterogeneous sources.

Circular economy is a paradigm that drives new legislative approaches such as extended producer responsibility or plastic taxes that aim to make an economy is sustainable.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation glossary defines circular economy as "A systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. It is based on three principles, driven by design: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and regenerate nature. It is underpinned by a transition to renewable energy and materials. Transitioning to a circular economy entails decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources. This represents a systemic shift that builds long-term resilience, generates business and economic opportunities, and provides environmental and societal benefits."

The concept distinguishes finite materials and renewables. Finite materials are non-biodegradable. A circular economy applies technical cycles to finite materials. Technical cycles ensure that a product is kept in circulation in the economy or that its value is preserved for as long as possible through sharing, maintaining, reusing, refurbishing, or recycling. Renewables are handled in biological cycles. In biological cycles processes are applied to renewables that regenerate their natural capital, such as composting or anaerobic digestion. SAP Responsible Design and Production considers reuse and recycling information, depending on report scopes.

• Collect the necessary business data (either through manual excel import or automated data integration), fill out the file templates, and import data to SAP Responsible Design and Production.
• Resolve data issues such as wrong file types, corrupt files, or missing or inconsistent data.

Verify and review packaging data such as packaging elements and packaging compositions.

This role contains ERP expert or sustainability manager.

• Enable the report categories that are needed by the producer.
• Configure and generate reports.

• Reporting Frequency: Companies obligated to the Packaging Waste Management Contribution are required to file annual reports containing information about the packaging of one sale unit by the consumer, a collection of sale units or the packaging due to transporting of sale units to prevent damage.

• Reporting Deadline: Companies need to file their annual report for a calendar year by March 31 of the next calendar year.

• Payment of Fees: Based on the information in the reports they file, companies receive an invoice in the year after they file the report, and are expected to make a payment within the stipulated timeframe (currently, 30 days) to Statiegeld Nederland.

Packaging – Every product is packaged to ensure it remains intact or doesn’t get damaged during transport, storage or handling. Packaging can be of the following types:

• PRIMARY & SUB-PRIMARY: Packaging that stays in contact with the product and in most cases is the end-consumer packaging. For example, multiple chocolate cookies are packed in a box consisting of an upper and lower part, 2 pieces of plastic inlay and 2 pieces of plastic film. All these different components (box, plastic inlay and plastic film) belong to primary and sub-primary packaging categories.
• SECONDARY: Packaging that is mainly used for grouping multiple primary packaged units together. 6 box of chocolate cookies are packed in a carton, which is sealed using an adhesive tape.
• TERTIARY: Packaging that helps protect secondary packaging or individual units during transportation (e.g. pallets, pallets shrink wrap). 40 cartons (which has 240 boxes of chocolate cookies in total) are packed together in a pallet using a stretch film.

Look at packaging composition for 40 cartons of cookies. 1 pallet consists of 40 cartons of chocolate cookies and every carton consists of 6 boxes of chocolate cookies. In other words, 1 pallet will consist of 240 boxes of chocolate cookies

Primary & sub-primary packaging:

• Lower part of box: 240 pcs (sub-primary)
• Upper part of box: 240 pcs (sub-primary)
• Plastic inlay: 480 pcs (2 pcs in each box)
• Plastic film: 480 pcs (2 pcs in each box)

Secondary packaging:

• Carton: 40 pcs
• Adhesive tape: 80m (2m tape for every carton)

Tertiary packaging:

• Pallet: 1 pc
• Stretch film: 5 m (5m for each pallet)