From 18 February 2027 the product passport becomes mandatory for industrial batteries above 2 kWh, EV and LMT batteries. A passport cannot be assembled from a spreadsheet after the fact — it needs product genealogy captured by the MES while the goods are being made. Here is which data has to be linked, which standards now govern it (EN 18219, EN 18220), and what a mid-sized factory can realistically finish in five months.

On 18 February 2027 the Digital Product Passport obligation goes live for industrial batteries above 2 kWh and EV batteries (Regulation 2023/1542). Five and a half months is not much time — OEM suppliers (Volkswagen, Stellantis, BMW) are already, from August 2026, asking sub-suppliers for MES-side data readiness. This piece gathers what the DPP must contain in detail, the role of MES in that structure, lessons from the first 12 EU pilots (Battery Pass Consortium, Circulor/Volvo, ACC, Verkor), and a concrete 5.5-month roadmap for a European battery plant.

On 2 August 2026 the AI Act enforcement regime for high-risk systems went live. Fifteen days later we have the first market data: which documents supervisory authorities actually request, what the first wave of information requests looks like, where European factories are stumbling most often. This article gathers facts from the first two weeks of Annex III enforcement in EU manufacturing — no marketing, with concrete cases and a realistic list of items an MES must have in order first.

The CBAM definitive period started on 1 January 2026, and 1 August 2026 is the deadline for the first periodic report under the new regime. European companies in steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, hydrogen and electricity — whether importing into the EU or exporting to carbon-aware markets — need to start computing embedded emissions per tonne of product. This article walks through what data MES + EMS must produce, how to map it to PCF (ISO 14067), which tools actually work, what it costs and what the penalties are. Plus a six-week roadmap to the deadline.

The Polish amendment to the National Cybersecurity Act (KSC2), transposing the EU NIS2 Directive, enters real enforcement in the second half of 2026. Factories producing chemicals, food, machinery, automotive, electronics or medical devices — if they employ more than 50 people — are classified as "important entities" and fall under the full obligations package. This article walks through the ten Article 21 NIS2 requirements from an MES perspective: which functions already produce compliance evidence, what is missing, how every external API (OpenAI, cloud LLM, SaaS MES) grows your audit surface, and what to do concretely in the remaining months of 2026.

On 18 February 2027 the battery passport becomes mandatory for EV batteries, industrial batteries above 2 kWh, and LMT batteries — the first concrete moment when the Digital Product Passport (DPP) turns from EU concept into a hard production requirement. For an MES, this means exposing roughly seventeen attributes per unit: material origin, carbon footprint, recycled content, batch ID, durability, cell health data. This article walks through ESPR (2024/1781) and the Battery Regulation (2023/1542) without fluff: which MES functions already produce the data, what is missing, how to wire it up architecturally with GS1 Digital Link, and what to do in the nine months left before the deadline.

On 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act high-risk rules become fully enforceable. A subset of MES functions — predictive maintenance tied to machine safety, operator performance monitoring, AI in medical-grade quality control, and AI-assisted workforce decisions — may be classified as high-risk, with fines up to €15M for breaches. This article maps concrete MES modules to Annex I and Annex III, lists the seven obligations of high-risk operators, and gives a 3-month action checklist for plant owners.

Nvidia and the data problem at a broader scale