SAP has announced the availability of SAP Responsible Design and Production, a solution to help brands accelerate their transition to circular-economy business practices. The new solution helps companies gain better visibility of material flows through their processes including tracking and complying with rapidly changing regulations, especially those concerning product packaging and plastics.

With SAP’s new solution, businesses can embed circularity principles into core business processes, helping eliminate waste and unlock new value by designing products to be sustainable from inception. For example, a shampoo brand manager has visibility into the full product lifecycle, including their extended producer responsibility (EPR) obligations and the plastic taxes of different markets.

This visibility helps the brand manager make design changes to reduce waste and decisions on how to lower the costs of the downstream reuse and recycling systems.

SAP Responsible Design and Production, a cloud-native solution co-developed with Accenture on SAP Business Technology Platform, provides tailored intelligence that enables businesses to keep pace with EPR regulations and plastic taxes, embed circularity principles into core business processes and optimize design for sustainable business.

This is the latest offering in a growing portfolio of sustainability-specific software applications that help businesses increase their measurement and data management capabilities.