RSPO: Why We’ve Launched a New Agile Traceability System for Palm Oil

By: Dr Inke Van Der Sluijs, RSPO

(As first published in Business Green on 1 April 2025)

RSPO’s Dr Inke Van Der Sluijs lifts the lid on the non-profit’s new certification, trade and traceability system which provides real-time data and analytics on palm oil supply chains

Even the most sophisticated systems depend on the people that build it. Technology powers innovation, but human insight and stewardship make the system effective.

In February, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) launched ‘prisma by RSPO’, the latest generation of RSPO’s evolving IT systems, built with two decades of experience and lessons learned. We’ve come a long way from where we started two decades ago as a small operation, and since overseeing the first trade of sustainable material back in 2008. I’ve seen how our systems have evolved, and today we’re more interconnected than ever in a rapid-fire digital world.

prisma is an advanced and agile certification, trade, and traceability system that provides real-time data and analytics. The first of its kind in the sustainable palm oil industry, prisma enables RSPO Members to improve trade compliance and streamline information, optimising supply chains amid tightening legislative frameworks around the world.

Tracing the traceability systems: A brief history

Transforming commodities to become sustainable is challenging – without optimised logistics, a farmer’s sustainable product may not reach buyers directly. Mindful of this, GreenPalm was launched in 2006 as an offsetting mechanism for buyers to support sustainable farmers. In hindsight, this was a smart move for RSPO – an effective way to promote support for smallholders by providing incentives to pursue certification, and a new mechanism for companies to start sourcing sustainable palm oil. Back then, multinationals like Unilever covered their entire palm oil consumption with RSPO Credits because logistics for the sustainable palm oil trade were not in place yet. The earliest incarnation of RSPO’s traceability system for the physical trade of certified oil palm products was RSPO eTrace, developed in 2010. We worked in partnership with UTZ Certified, which already had a system to trace certified commodities, including coffee, tea, hazelnut and cocoa. eTrace’s main functionality was registering mill information and sales of certified oil palm products. In 2015, GreenPalm and eTrace were linked so the sustainable palm oil and palm kernel oil volumes by mills were managed through one account. The systems were merged into PalmTrace in 2017, allowing for both physical and credit trading in one platform, tracking certified sustainable palm oil volumes in real-time.

The scaling up of these systems has mirrored the growth of RSPO itself; 20 per cent of global palm oil production is meeting the RSPO Standards alongside a growing global membership. To stay ahead of the curve, RSPO had to adapt and evolve to a more robust system that could house the significant data built over 12 years.

Building prisma: Change management and challenges

prisma by RSPO is the latest iteration of this continuous evolution. Similar to how the previous systems were responsive to our members’ needs, prisma was designed to address key challenges in the palm oil supply chain, including manual processes, fragmented data, and limited real-time visibility. By streamlining certification management and improving stakeholder interaction, prisma addresses these issues to ensure better compliance and a more efficient oversight of certified sustainable palm oil trade.

Building prisma has been far from easy. Together with our partners, NGIS and Agridence, we wanted to design a system that would be efficient and user-friendly. This required extensive collaboration with internal and external stakeholders for nearly two years. Integrating prisma with RSPO’s existing legacy systems, required the monumental task of cleaning, classifying and arranging 12 years of data from six different sources. This data migration involved over 700 parameters, over 11,000 unique member records, and a total dataset of 20GB— the equivalent of reading seven million lines of text.

Change management was critical, as many stakeholders had been accustomed to the traditional tools and processes that were in place. Overall, ensuring that prisma didn’t disrupt existing workflows while enhancing efficiency has been our chief focus.

The long view

As of early March, prisma‘s user base has surpassed the previous platform, ensuring continuity in operations. Several trade licences have already been processed and issued, and trade activity has accelerated, with a rise in both shipping announcements and credit transactions, demonstrating strong adoption and engagement from members.

prisma’s long-term success hinges on continuous improvements based on user feedback. Through its agile design, prisma will support users in adapting to regulatory changes, market demands and technological advancements. This is where our Roundtable DNA is critical, the collaborative efforts of internal teams, technology partners, members and industry stakeholders are key to its success.

Looking ahead, we aspire for prisma to empower our members in meeting their future needs, by guaranteeing checks and balances for the material that they trade. Long-term, we want to enable our members to tell a more complete sustainability story. By showcasing key impact data— from reduced carbon emissions and water footprint, to actions to ensure the wellbeing of the smallholders and communities impacted by palm oil production – members could demonstrate credible evidence of their initiatives to transform the sector, which goes beyond a certificate.

prisma has already attracted attention beyond the palm oil industry, with other commodity sectors expressing interest in adopting similar digital solutions. This reinforces our belief that sustainability and transparency challenges are cross-sectoral issues – and collaborative, technology-driven solutions like prisma hold vast opportunities to transform global supply chains.

About the author: Dr. Inke Van Der Sluijs is director for market transformation at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).