The Digital Product Logbook
A passport explains what something is: its identity, its declared composition, its manufacturer, its compliance information at the point it was made available. A logbook preserves what happens to it afterwards — the events that accumulate over the product's working life, attached to the same identity the passport describes.
What a logbook records
Events attach to the product's identity as they happen, in order:
- Installation
- Where and when the product was put into service, and by whom.
- Commissioning
- The checks that confirmed the product was ready for use.
- Inspection
- Scheduled or triggered checks of the product's condition.
- Maintenance
- Planned upkeep performed against the product.
- Faults
- Reported problems, with the evidence that supported the report.
- Measurements
- Readings taken from or about the product over time.
- Repairs
- Corrective work performed, and by which credentialed technician.
- Replacement parts
- Components swapped in, each carrying its own identity where one exists.
- Warranty events
- Claims made, accepted, or declined against the product's warranty.
- Ownership or custody changes
- Who was responsible for the product, and when that changed.
- Reuse
- The product, or a part of it, put into a new use.
- Deconstruction
- Removal from its installed context, tracked as an event in its own right.
- End-of-life decisions
- What was decided for the product once its working life in that use ended.
Illustrative workflow: one battery, commissioning to second life
- Commissioning. The battery's passport is issued at manufacture; the logbook opens with a commissioning entry when it is installed in its first application.
- In-service measurements. Periodic state-of-health measurements are logged against the battery's identity, not against the device it sits inside.
- A fault and a repair. A fault is reported, diagnosed, and assessed by a qualified technician and addressed according to the applicable safety procedure — with the decision and work logged.
- Removal. When the first application retires the battery, a deconstruction event records its condition and remaining capacity at that point.
- Second life. The battery is matched to a second application with lower demands; a new custody entry opens the next chapter of the same continuous logbook, not a new one.
What you can use today
- Digital product passports
- Wallet credentials for technicians
See Facts for the available record and identity foundations.
Related: digital product passports for the identity a logbook attaches to, the building logbook for how equipment-level logbooks fit into a whole building, and material circulation for what happens once a product's next use is a different one entirely.