Turn the EU Digital Product Passport into a Competitive Advantage
The intended focus of the EU Digital Product Passport is to enable sustainability and the circular economy. In reality, the infrastructure required for the EU DPP can fundamentally change the Tyre market. Viewing the DPP not as a regulatory hurdle, but as a strategic program for digital transformation, unlocks a new generation of value across the entire tyre lifecycle.
So, while some companies are gearing up for compliance in mid-2028, others are racing ahead to unlock growth across four strategic pillars, based on the unique identification of each Tyre using RAIN Tags, and a shared data space accessible by all ecosystem partners.
1. The operational excellence pillar. The frictionless supply chain.
The ability to identify individual tyres and openly share data enables a transparent, efficient, and collaborative supply chain that benefits all partners. The possibilities are numerous, but we note some significant examples.
- Automated Logistics: Mass-reading of tyres at dock doors and checkpoints reduces receiving times from hours to minutes, virtually eliminates shipping errors, and provides real-time visibility into inventory levels.
- Channel Partner Integration: Dealers and distributors gain access to accurate stock information, reducing their inventory costs and improving service levels for the end consumer.
- Quality and Recall Precision: In the event of a quality issue, the surgical recall of specific, affected tyres drastically reduces costs and protects brand reputation, providing a significant improvement over broad, batch-level recalls.
- Loss and Theft prevention: Embedding uniquely identifiable tags into the tyres helps dramatically reduce operational or accidental loss as it provides for accurate inventory counts, verifiable shipping and logistics, and simplifies the location of misplaced stock. Theft is reduced as tagging enables an undeniable chain of custody, you know where in the supply chain the tyres went missing, and it reduces the value of the stolen tyres.
- The Service Transformation Pillar: Moving from Products to Performance
By leveraging trusted item-specific data, manufacturers can offer high-value services to their downstream clients, such as.
- Predictive Maintenance & Fleet Management services: Prevent theft and impersonation. Proactively schedule maintenance, optimize rotation, and prevent costly downtime, thereby directly improving a client’s operational efficiency. When sensors are included, this can extend to analysing real-world data on tread wear, pressure, and usage history.
- Certified Lifecycle Management: Provide a trusted, unalterable history for each tyre casing. This enhances the value and safety of retreading programs and creates a reliable secondary market for certified assets.
- The Sustainability Pillar: Turning an Obligation into a Verifiable Asset
As RAIN Tags can survive the entire life of a tyre, when coupled with the data space, they can be the key enabler of corporate sustainability goals.
- Verifiable Circularity: Provide auditable proof of a tyre’s journey from “cradle to grave,” including material composition, retreading history, and end-of-life processing. This data is invaluable for corporate clients looking to meet their own ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) targets.
- Efficient Recycling: Providing recyclers with the exact material makeup of each tyre enables higher-value material recovery, improving the economics of the circular economy.
- Future-Proofing Market Access: Early and strategic adoption of this technology enables compliance with upcoming regulations such as the EU DPP and similar requirements coming from other jurisdictions, securing a manufacturer’s position as a responsible and forward-thinking leader in key markets like the EU.
- The Data Ecosystem Pillar: Forging a New Collaborative Frontier
All this only works if every entity in the supply chain speaks the same language. This is where GDSO’s Tire Information system comes into play. This system enables each tyre company to retain control of its data while providing controlled access to ecosystem partners.
- Speaking a common language: GDSO defines a common data set, covering all business-critical data, including the Tyre DPP, and makes it available to all stakeholders through a secure centralised authentication system. What each type of stakeholder has access to can be fully controlled. This common language and data service is defined and maintained by GDSO members, that is to say, the Tyre industry itself.
- Informed Product Innovation: Aggregate anonymized, real-world performance data to understand exactly how tyres perform. These insights can directly inform the next generation of product design, leading to safer, more efficient, and more durable tyres.
- Enhanced Consumer Trust: RFID readers will soon be available in phones. A simple scan can provide consumers with the full story of their tyre, from its origin to its performance characteristics, building a direct and lasting relationship based on transparency and trust.
The infrastructure to comply with the Digital Product Passport program is not just about meeting a deadline. It is about seizing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to digitize the physical asset, transform business models, and create a smarter, more sustainable, and more profitable tyre industry.
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