Global Automotive Coatings Leader

Business Challenge

A global paint and coatings company strengthened its North American market position through the acquisition of an established automotive coatings manufacturer. The strategic move brought great opportunity to the newly-formed and rebranded company. However, along with opportunity, the deal brought formidable IT challenges that stood between not just realizing, but maximizing, the business opportunity:

• A significant amount of data (over 10,000 formula, finished product, and raw material substances) resided in legacy systems;
• No integration to SAP systems existed—from development through commercialization;
  As a required divestiture activity, the entire business had to be migrated to a new ECC 6.0 environment.

The impact to the business was twofold:

• Product development processes were inefficient, putting the business at a competitive disadvantage with regard to speed to market.
• The business was unduly exposed to regulatory and compliance risks due to lack of data consistency, unification, and automation.

Solution

With a migration to ECC 6.0, Linx-AS identified an opportunity to unify product data, embed product compliance, and establish a solid framework for growth for the automotive coatings company. Implementing complementary SAP PLM technologies to address the immediate business challenges while instilling best-practice processes to ensure long-term strategic alignment, the solution included:

• Centralization of product data, which included over 5,000 formulas migrated to SAP
• Ongoing management of ingredients, formulas, and recipes in SAP
• Streamlined product data management process for the creation and change of material masters and bills of materials
• Automated MSDS authoring for over 5,000 products via solution to manage BOM changes, regulatory data, content, and rules
• Automated dangerous goods checks against sales and distribution to reduce compliance risk
• Automated generation of shipping labels to ensure regulatory compliance
• Substance volume tracking for U.S. TSCA 12b Export Notification, Canadian NDSL/DSL, and DEA Controlled Substances