Moving beyond compliance

As global supply chains face tightening sustainability regulations and growing demands for transparency, companies are being asked to generate trusted, interoperable, and verifiable product-level sustainability data.

Across industries, this challenge is often framed as a compliance burden. Yet across Lisa’s research, including the recent paper published in the  International Journal of Operations & Production Management  (IJOPM), a different picture emerges. Supply networks that rely on trusted data, not simply for reporting requirements, but as a strategic asset generate significant operational and economic value by allowing them to run circular supply networks.

This perspective aligns with the Circular Transformation of Industries initiative from the World Economic Forum, supported by SAP, that is reframing the digital sustainability landscape: shifting from “reporting because we must” to “leveraging sustainability data because it pays.”

Why trust is the systemic missing link

The article “The role of digital technologies in configuring circular ecosystems” (Rossi & Srai, 2024) and the WEF paper on the “Circular Transformation of Industries: the Role of Partnerships”, shows that sustainability data exchanges often fail due to misaligned incentives, unclear governance, and limited comparability.

The research finds that companies struggle with:

• Low trust among supply chain partners, especially when sensitive data is shared.
• Lack of standardisation, leading to duplication and incompatible reporting.
• Fragmented digital systems, causing material and data “leakage” throughout product lifecycles.
• Unclear value-sharing mechanisms, especially in circular models.

These challenges echo findings from the recent BSI reports and campaign  “Trust as a Tipping Point: Building Trust in the Circular Economy”  (BSI, 2025). Those studies show that trust behaves as a systemic threshold: once customers, manufacturers, and suppliers trust how their data will be used and how the data is validated, participation expands rapidly; below that threshold, even well-designed systems fail to scale.

Harmonisation as a precondition for scalable circularity

The World Economic Forum publications on  “Harmonizing Metrics to Measure Circularity: A Call to Action”  (WEF, 2024) highlights the strategic importance of global interoperability.

Today, companies face:

• Multiple overlapping data schemes
• Region-specific regulatory requirements
• Incompatible definitions of lifecycle information
• Fragmented approaches to digital product passports

The overarching message is that without harmonised, sector-wide standards, sustainability data systems cannot scale or generate economic value.

How sustainability data creates economic value

Technology providers such as SAP are enabling organisations to recognise the strategic upside of high-quality digital sustainability data. Lisa’s research across IJOPM, BSI, and WEF materials reveals  three primary mechanisms  through which trusted sustainability data creates economic value.

1. Operational Efficiency

The IJOPM study demonstrates that companies often spend vast amounts of time extracting supply network product data.
Trusted, standardised data dramatically reduces these challenges by:

• Decreasing manual data extraction and handling
• Reducing product inspection decisions and material/product processing steps
• Improving supply and demand forward and reverse flow planning e.g. product recovery incentivisation strategies

Efficiency is not only a compliance win, but also a profitability lever.

2. Strategic Decision-Making Through Transparency

Across the research, organisations with access to reliable supply network ecosystem data (material, financial, and economic) can:

• Identify digital intervention or the need to involve intermediary actors
• Optimise material circularity (repair, remanufacturing, reuse)
• Model financial residual value of assets
• Improve product design for sustainability and durability
• Forecast and de-risk supply disruptions tied to resource scarcity

Here, sustainability data becomes operational intelligence, not just reporting output.

3. Competitive Advantage Through Trust and Market Signalling

The BSI campaign shows that suppliers who provide  trusted, verifiable sustainability data  gain tangible commercial benefits:

• Preferred-supplier status
• Access to green procurement programmes
• Ability to command price premiums
• Stronger investor confidence

Similarly, WEF insights emphasise how harmonised data standards unlock cross-border trade opportunities, helping companies avoid future compliance costs and simplify digital product passport readiness.

Digital product passports as value creation tools

Technology providers such as SAP are enabling organisations to recognise the strategic upside of high-quality digital sustainability data. Lisa’s research across IJOPM, BSI, and WEF materials reveals  three primary mechanisms  through which trusted sustainability data creates economic value.

1. Operational Efficiency

The IJOPM study demonstrates that companies often spend vast amounts of time extracting supply network product data.
Trusted, standardised data dramatically reduces these challenges by:

• Decreasing manual data extraction and handling
• Reducing product inspection decisions and material/product processing steps
• Improving supply and demand forward and reverse flow planning e.g. product recovery incentivisation strategies

Efficiency is not only a compliance win, but also a profitability lever.

2. Strategic Decision-Making Through Transparency

Across the research, organisations with access to reliable supply network ecosystem data (material, financial, and economic) can:

• Identify digital intervention or the need to involve intermediary actors
• Optimise material circularity (repair, remanufacturing, reuse)
• Model financial residual value of assets
• Improve product design for sustainability and durability
• Forecast and de-risk supply disruptions tied to resource scarcity

Here, sustainability data becomes operational intelligence, not just reporting output.

3. Competitive Advantage Through Trust and Market Signalling

The BSI campaign shows that suppliers who provide  trusted, verifiable sustainability data  gain tangible commercial benefits:

• Preferred-supplier status
• Access to green procurement programmes
• Ability to command price premiums
• Stronger investor confidence

Similarly, WEF insights emphasise how harmonised data standards unlock cross-border trade opportunities, helping companies avoid future compliance costs and simplify digital product passport readiness.

What industry needs next

To fully unlock economic value from sustainability data, industry must invest in:

1. Harmonised standards

Insights from WEF and BSI show that industry-wide measures, consistent product definitions, and aligned data models are essential.

2. Interoperable digital infrastructure

The IJOPM article demonstrates that circular operations break down without shared, trusted information pools.

3. Governance models that define ownership, access, and incentives

Data trust is strongest when value-sharing arrangements are clear and fair.

4. A shift in perception

From “sustainability reporting” to “sustainability intelligence for operational excellence.”

This is precisely where SAP’s ecosystem-based approach offers system integration potential.

SAP’s role in the transition to business value

Darren West, SAP’s Global Head of Circular Economy Solutions, puts it like this:

“The circular economy cannot operate effectively without trusted business data connecting procurement, manufacturing, logistics, compliance, and finance. Companies need a way to see across the entire lifecycle of products and materials, not just across isolated functions.

Circularity is not failing due to lack of technology - It’s failing because it’s too hard to adopt across the supply chain. The real challenge is multiple stakeholders, fragmented systems, and misaligned incentives. Circularity only works if the entire supply chain moves — not just one company.”

This is why SAP supports the excellent work from Lisa and her research team and is directly involved with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and World Business Council for Sustainable Development on circularity projects. We see that regulations drive deadlines but business value drive – such as reducing materials use, or supply chain risk – drives scale and adoption, as long as there is trust in the system.

SAP helps address that challenge by embedding sustainability and circularity into core enterprise processes. That includes the ability to track materials, manage product and compliance data, and support decisions that improve resource efficiency across the business, using trusted data.

Conclusion: Trusted data as the backbone of sustainable value creation

What we find is that to move beyond compliance, trusted sustainability data becomes a system enabler, and right now – can often be missing.It uncovers new circular revenue streams:

• It drives efficiency and lowers operational costs.
• It builds market and investor trust.
• It enhances resilience through visibility.
• It protects companies in a tightening regulatory landscape.

Regulation may spark action, but economic value will sustain it. With harmonised standards, trusted digital infrastructure, and the right governance, sustainability data becomes not a burden, but a growth driver.