Transitioning to a circular economy is a big challenge, but Christine Brautsch and Tina Wiegand from Hof University in Germany are using Camunda to solve it. They spoke at CamundaCon 2023 in New York City on how Camunda has helped them create transparency along the entire supply chain, creating the foundation for more sustainable businesses all over the world.
Creating a digital product passport
Brauch pointed out that one of the issues with transitioning to a circular economy is that we don’t always know when a given product can be recycled, updated, or repaired. To solve this, the European Union introduced a new tool called a digital product passport (DPP).
A DPP contains information about a product’s origin, durability, composition, repairability, and end of life handling. It collects and shares product data throughout the entire product lifecycle and has product data from the whole supply chain, including raw materials, extraction, and manufacturing processes.
The data is meant to be shared with a wide range of different stakeholders such as retailers and consumers, but also waste management companies such as sorters and recycling companies. The DPP should enable easier reuse, repair and recycling activities, which in turn should reduce environmental impact and help realize the circular economy.
Brauch and Weigand knew the implementation of DPPs would affect every industry, with far-reaching implications for nearly all business processes. Stakeholders need to have information about materials, compositions, chemical ingredients used for products, transportation, carbon footprint information, repairability, spare parts availability, and disposal. That’s a lot of data required for every single product, and it’s very complex and time-consuming to collect, process, and provide all this data.
Fortunately, Brauch and Weigand were ideally placed to consider how to best implement the DPP. Hof University is located in Hof, Germany, a region with a long tradition in the textile industry. Creating a circular economy has proven to be a particularly thorny problem for textile manufacturers. The global textile industry today follows a linear model consisting of three phases: taking, making, and wasting. Manufacturers take raw materials such as water, cotton, and crude oil and make fibers, yarns, fabrics, and ultimately clothing out of them in very resource-intensive, energy-intensive, and sometimes very polluting processes.
Only about 1% of textiles are recycled today. The rest are incinerated or landfilled. If you buy a T-shirt at a store, you can get some information about where it’s manufactured and some information about the fabric it’s made out of. That’s it. It’s therefore very difficult for the consumer to make informed purchasing decisions about the sustainability of the shirt. If the consumer cuts the label out of the shirt after it’s been bought, then the recycling company that gets the shirt after it’s discarded will have no information at all about it, which means they won’t know how to correctly recycle it.
As a result, the recycling rate is extremely low in the textile industry. This is why the EU has identified the textile industry as one of the first to be required to adopt the DPP legislation.
Preparing the textile industry for greater sustainability
As Brauch and Weigand began to think about preparing the textile companies in their area for what’s coming, they asked themselves what needed to change in the existing practices and existing processes in the textile industry. And how could Hof University support manufacturers to create a digital product passport?
The first thing they did was try to understand the process of creating new textiles. They needed a tool that could help people visualize and discuss processes in a common language. After comparing different tools used in different industries, Brauch and Weigand settled on Camunda, thanks to its capability of creating a process with BPMN notation which would allow for easy visualization. It would also facilitate automating and orchestrating the process when it was time for implementation—an end-to-end approach.
Of course, their work was cut out for them. Up to 100 stakeholders could be involved, and as many as 250 activities have to be accounted for in the process. There were also two major weaknesses in the process.
The first is that the entire process focuses on linear usage, which means the circular aspect needed for the DPP is completely missing. Second, there is a lack of networking throughout the process. Stakeholders like suppliers, consumers, transport companies, and recycling companies don’t talk to each other, don’t share data, and sometimes don’t even know each other.
Building a process as a service with Camunda
Brauch and Weigand knew they needed to reduce complexity. As a first step, they decided to cluster the current process into four very common phases in process management:
- Concept to product
- Plan to produce
- Order to cache
- Use to dispose
These describe the complete life cycle of a product, starting from its active use by the customer until its final disposal or reuse at the end of its life.
The use-to-dispose phase is not part of the usual linear textile manufacturing process, but it now has to be for the EU requirements of reuse and recycle. Brauch and Weigand chose to illustrate this phase with a black box in their BPMN.
The second step was to map the DPP requirements to the process activities for the entire product development process, including the black box of use-to-dispose.
To ensure that all activities are orchestrated efficiently, the process needed a platform in which all the data about a product could be stored, processed, and provided to all stakeholders. This would ensure maximum transparency, so that all information could be provided to all stakeholders, particularly those in the supply chain coming after the manufacturer (eg, retailers, consumers, recycling companies). With this data platform, products could be used in a more sustainable way by increasing reuse or recycling activities, which creates a circular material flow.
Brauch and Weigand call this platform the Digital Product Passport Hub. Realizing how important such a hub could be for sustainable businesses all over the world, they mapped the requirements coming out of EU legislation and created a structured basis for process as a service.
Brauch and Weigand also realized that to create a true end-to-end approach, they needed a central platform that can capture,exchange, and store data based on the latest technologies such as blockchain and AI. They’ve developed the prototype for a platform that includes a user frontend, which can now be integrated as a connector to the process as a service with Camunda.
This progress is exciting, not just as an academic exercise created at a university, but as a possible basis for new sustainable business models in the future. The problems that the DPP aims to address are global, not just limited to the EU—companies all around the world would love to have greater visibility into their supply chain data to help customers and stakeholders make more informed, sustainable choices for the planet.
Brauch and Weigand are actively searching for enterprise partners for their process as a service. As Brauch says, “Let’s make the world a little bit better together.”
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