The hard part of a Digital Product Passport is rarely the software — it is the data, and most of it is not yours. Material composition, substances, origin, test results and certificates all live upstream with your suppliers, who have no standard format and no obvious incentive to hand them over. Emailing spreadsheets around works for three suppliers and collapses at thirty. This is a practical method for collecting supplier data at scale, and how PassPer's supplier portal removes most of the friction.
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Before contacting anyone, be precise about what a passport for your product group requires, because vague requests get vague answers. Typically you need: material and substance composition (including any regulated substances), the origin or provenance of key materials, recycled-content shares, supporting certificates and test reports, and product-specific attributes such as durability, repairability or carbon data. Map each required passport field to the single supplier who holds it, so every request is short, specific and clearly owned. A supplier asked for three exact figures responds; a supplier sent a forty-column spreadsheet does not.
The default method — mail a spreadsheet template, wait, chase, reconcile — breaks down for predictable reasons. Versions diverge as people edit local copies. Half your suppliers open everything on a phone, where a wide spreadsheet is unusable. Language is a barrier when your supply chain spans several countries. There is no audit trail of who claimed what, and no way to reuse an answer a supplier already gave you last quarter. Every product launch restarts the same manual chase. What looks like a data problem is really a workflow problem — the request format is wrong for the people you are asking.
The approach that works removes every barrier between the supplier and the answer. Each supplier receives a unique tokenised link — no account, no password, no login — that opens a short, mobile-friendly form asking only for the fields they own, in their language. They can attach a certificate or spec sheet directly. Because each declaration is stored against that supplier, a reusable answer can be pulled forward the next time the same material appears in a product, so nobody is asked twice for the same fact. This is exactly how PassPer's supplier portal works: multilingual tokenised requests, mobile-first forms, and declarations that become reusable across your catalogue.
Non-response is the norm, so the system — not you — should handle it. Automatic reminders chase suppliers who have not replied, on a schedule, without you tracking a follow-up list. Prioritise effort by coverage: rank suppliers by how many of your SKUs depend on them, and pursue the handful that unlock the most products first rather than spreading attention evenly. As answers arrive, they do not stay as loose emails — PassPer turns each response into structured, attributed passport fields, with the supporting document attached and human review applied before a figure is sealed into a published passport. See how a passport is built end to end.
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