How Hummel keeps reporting simple
As an international sports and fashion company, Hummel sells its products in a wide range of markets. This also means navigating different national extended producer responsibility requirements and keeping track of which products and data need to be reported in each country.
Extended producer responsibility for textiles and footwear is therefore nothing new to Hummel. The company is already subject to the scheme in France, where it was introduced in 2007, and has most recently registered in the Netherlands, which introduced its scheme in 2023.
But textiles are only part of the task. Hummel also manages extended producer responsibility for areas including electronics, batteries, sports and leisure products, and packaging across several markets. Extended producer responsibility is managed from the company’s headquarters, and as Hummel enters new markets, more producer responsibility obligations are on the way.
This requires both a clear overview and good data. For each scheme, Hummel needs to understand the requirements, register correctly and ensure that its products can be classified and quantified according to the categories that must be reported.
This work is handled in part by Sofie Amalie Banke, CSR Coordinator at Hummel.
“We are a large company, but we face the same challenges as everyone else. We need to understand new legislation before we change anything, because you cannot simply make a change without it potentially having an impact elsewhere,” she says.
France is a good example of how complex the task can be. Here, Hummel reports to the French producer responsibility organisation Refashion, which uses its own definitions and product categories.
One of the major tasks has therefore been determining how Hummel’s own product categories correspond to those used by the French system.
“The amount of data in France is a puzzle when it comes to how we categorise our products. First, you have to go into your product master data and then categorise the products according to the definitions used by Refashion. That means we have to assess where each of our products belongs,” says Sofie Amalie Banke.
At the same time, the categorisation needs to stand up to scrutiny if Hummel is audited.
“We were selected for an audit and had to explain why we had placed our products in particular categories. Following the audit, we standardised our categories based on Refashion’s codes,” says Sofie Amalie Banke.
Today, the French codes are stored alongside Hummel’s other master data. When the company extracts its sales figures, the products can therefore automatically be grouped according to the relevant codes, creating a dataset for the specific report.
“We entered the data manually once, creating a kind of master dataset. Once that was done, the data could be linked to our product categories. Now, when we extract sales data in Power BI, I can sort it by codes and markets.”
This made a tangible difference the last time Hummel reported in France.
“Reporting this year was actually very easy. My system simply aggregated the data for all products with the same code.”
The French report is submitted once a year. For other producer responsibility schemes, Hummel reports more frequently. Here, the company uses the same principle: The setup for each individual report is saved as a standard report in Power BI and can be reused with new sales figures.
One example is electronics in Germany. Once the report has been set up with the correct filters, Sofie Amalie Banke does not have to build it again for the next reporting period. As a result, even though the number of registrations has increased, ongoing reporting has become one of the less time-consuming parts of the work.
“I just select a filter in Power BI and extract the data. It now takes me 20–30 minutes to complete the monthly reporting for both Germany and Denmark.”
For Hummel, it is also about making the administration of extended producer responsibility as simple as possible. When extended producer responsibility for packaging was introduced in Denmark, the company therefore looked at several different producer responsibility organisations before choosing Retur.
“We had meetings with several different providers, but we quickly felt confident choosing Retur. We are pleased to be able to manage our producer responsibility obligations in one place, which also helps make the monthly reporting easier.”
That does not mean that extended producer responsibility as a whole has become a small task. The time-consuming work simply lies elsewhere.
“Registration and appointing an authorised representative are what take a long time when working with extended producer responsibility. Then there is researching markets and prices. The monthly reports themselves do not take very long.”
The systematisation also makes the work less dependent on any one employee.
“It also makes it easier for others to extract the data if I am out of the office.”
In France, Hummel’s annual reports have been accepted without comments since the company registered, using the system it has in place today.
Hummel’s solution is built around the company’s own systems and Power BI, so it cannot necessarily be copied directly by other companies.
But according to Sofie Amalie Banke, the principle behind it can be applied much more broadly: Structure your products and the relevant data - such as categories, weight and materials - so that the work does not have to start from scratch every time a report is due.
“If you categorise your products, it becomes easier to work with the data consistently going forward. This is particularly important if you are selected for an audit.”
For companies preparing for extended producer responsibility for textiles and footwear, she points to some basic information as a good place to start.
“Sorting your textiles into categories and adding weight data is a good start.”