Do I need a PIM for the Digital Product Passport?

No law prescribes a PIM for the Digital Product Passport, and the passport will draw data from several systems. A PIM is the practical place to assemble the product-level attributes, approve them and publish them in a structured format.

The Digital Product Passport comes from the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which entered into force on 18 July 2024. ESPR is a framework: the data each product group must carry is set in later delegated acts, so requirements arrive product group by product group. The battery passport under the Battery Regulation applies earlier, from 18 February 2027, for electric vehicle, light means of transport and industrial batteries above 2 kWh.

Passport data typically spans three sources:

• Product identity and classification, often already in a PIM.
• Material composition, substances of concern and recycled content, often held in PLM, compliance tools or supplier files.
• Repair, disassembly and end-of-life instructions, usually documents and assets.

In PIMvendors selections, compliance data is the area where AI support remains unreliable, so approval workflows and audit trails count for more than generation features. Map every passport attribute to a source system and an owner before writing requirements for any tool.