How Sioen prepares its suppliers worldwide for the digital product passport
- Technologie & Platformen
- Client
- Sioen
- Year
- 2026
- Client
- Sioen
- Year
- 2026
- Category
- Technologie & Platformen
- Competence center(s)
- Unlock'd
Traceability to the subcontractor, with no margin of error
As a manufacturer of technical clothing and personal protective equipment, Sioen will have to deal with the digital product passport in the coming years: a European obligation that imposes traceability of garments to the consumer. Anyone who scans a QR code in the store must be able to see where a piece of clothing comes from and what is in it. Sioen already had a consumer-oriented website ready for this, but it had to be fed with correct data and that was precisely the problem.
Sioen works with dozens of subcontractors who effectively assemble the clothing somewhere in the world. Each of those work orders must be linked to the right QR codes and eventually synchronize with SAP. Sioen had never built a mobile app itself and the data also had to arrive reliably when SAP was temporarily unavailable. In short: a compliance issue that in practice was mainly a data and connectivity problem, spread over a global network of suppliers.
A lightweight architecture for a global compliance issue
Sioen already had a direction in mind, but it turned out to be more complex and less flexible than necessary. Competence center Unlockd proposed a simpler alternative: an iOS and Android app that allows suppliers to scan the purchase orders and associated QR codes, with an authentication layer so that Sioen knows who is using the app where.
Because not every location has a stable connection, the app can be used completely offline: scanning can be done without internet and as soon as a device comes back online, everything synchronizes automatically. Between the app and SAP, Unlockd placed an intermediate backend layer, so that data is also captured when SAP itself is down, to be synchronized from there.
In addition, Unlockd built a web dashboard for Sioen itself. This allows the internal team to follow up live on which work orders are running, how much has already been scanned and what the status of each order is. In this way, the solution not only serves the compliance obligation, but also gives the suppliers themselves an overview of their own orders for the first time. Unlockd also guided Sioen through their very first app store release, from knowledge about the process to the practical handling.
Ready to scale
The app recently went into production and is currently being gradually rolled out to the first suppliers. What is already clear: the architecture has been deliberately kept lean, without heavy backend infrastructure, but is still highly scalable. With dozens of suppliers and multiple users per supplier, the system should be able to handle peak loads of up to potentially tens of thousands of scans per second, including the scenario where many offline users come back online at the same time.
By the time the first DPP obligations become concrete, Sioen no longer has to look for a solution: it is already up and running and grows with every supplier that joins.