How to collect supplier data for a Digital Product Passport without chasing emails

Why supplier data is the bottleneck

A passport needs values that are complete, in the right format and backed by evidence. Suppliers are not set up to give you that. Each answers differently, tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers may not know your requirements at all, and nothing tells you who has answered and who has not.

The result is a team that spends its time following up instead of reviewing data.

A process that works

1. Identify the requirements that apply to your product category.
2. Create the structure of the passport: the fields, their formats and the evidence each one needs.
3. Define the information you need from suppliers, field by field.
4. Invite suppliers to submit product and material data through a secure link, so nobody needs an account to answer.
5. Review and validate what comes back. A person approves each value.
6. Prepare the passport for publication and access.

What good looks like

• One request per supplier, listing exactly what is needed.
• A clear view of who has answered, who has not and what is missing.
• Evidence attached to each value, such as a certificate or a test report.
• A reviewer who approves or rejects, with the decision recorded.
• Expiry dates tracked, so you are told before a certificate lapses and the supplier is asked for a new one.

Where AI helps, and where it should not decide

Reading a certificate and typing its values into a form is slow and error-prone. AI can read an uploaded document and suggest the values, so the reviewer starts from a draft instead of a blank field. The decision stays with a person: a suggestion is not an approval, and each approval is logged with who made it and when.

Common ways this goes wrong

• Several versions of the same spreadsheet, with no record of which one was used.
• Documents with no validity date, so nobody knows when they stop being current.
• No record of who approved a value, which is the first thing an auditor or a customer asks.
• Requirements that stop at tier 1, while the data you need sits at tier 3.

If you can fix only one of these, fix the approval record. It is what turns collected data into something you can defend.