Inks & Coatings Manufacturer

Business Challenge

With twenty-five U.S. production facilities and continued international expansion, the ink manufacturer seemingly had the perfect recipe for growth. But regulatory documentation was amassing rapidly and bogging down progress. And, the legacy software tool used for MSDS authoring, substance volume tracking (SVT), and label generation was failing in the face of growing opportunity.

Automating these processes was not only constructive from an operational and productivity standpoint but imperative in order to comply with environment, health, and safety regulations.

The key challenges facing the inks producer were:

• Integrating software for authoring MSDS with SAP software backbone
• Centralizing data to improve visibility, integrity, and accessibility
• Automating shipping labels and bill-of-material changes
• Increasing frequency of reports and improving reporting on chemical substances to customers
• Establishing a solid foundation to meet future regulatory requirements

The Solution

The SAP Environment, Health, and Safety application was the favored solution because of its tight integration with the company’s existing SAP environment and the availability of integrated SVT and global label management (GLM) functionality. After a conference room pilot of the application, Linx-AS completed the implementation in just six months, following the ASAP methodology and using preconfigured accelerators. The scope of the solution included:

• SAP EH&S Management including Product Safety, SVT, GLM, and third-party content and rules
• Migration of over 75,000 formula, finished product, intermediates and raw material substances as well as 50,000 MSDS documents
• Automated MSDS authoring for 300 to 600 new or changed products per day
• SVT for U.S. VOC, HAPS, heavy metals, and SARA 313 substance. Reduced reporting process from over one week to one day, and support time from four days to one day
• Management of BOM changes, regulatory data, content, & rules
• Automated  generation of shipping labels to ensure regulatory compliance
• Capacity to track 2 to 3 million transactions for over 500,000 product and substance items for specific regulations