Sustainability and Safety: New Solutions in the Cloud

SAP, a market leader in enterprise application software, has launched two new cloud-based solutions to help customers ensure their products comply with safety and sustainability requirements. Both products leverage the power and flexibility of a hybrid cloud and on-premise model to collaborate, collect, analyze and disseminate product information from disparate sources.

An ever complex regulatory landscape includes Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical substances (REACH) and Restrictions of Hazardous Substances (ROHS). Companies need to know exactly what chemical substances are in the raw materials, components and products that they purchase from suppliers. Besides, they must also declare those substances and tell people how to handle them safely.

One of the solutions is called SAP Product Stewardship Network. It allows manufacturers to collaborate with suppliers and collect detailed information about the substances that make up their products. It is aimed at discrete manufacturers, such as producers of electronic or medical equipment, and allows customers to quickly work with suppliers in the cloud to make sure that banned substances are excluded from their products. Currently this is a time-consuming, manual process involving thousands of email across the supply chain, which can result in loss-making delays. SAP Product Steward Network speeds up the process by allowing suppliers and manufacturers to collaborate immediately. They can quickly work together to make the appropriate disclosures, find the right substitutes or adapt product designs quickly based on available, compliant materials. By connecting suppliers in a cloud-based network, companies can easily exchange compliance and material data. New product information can be uploaded once and updated across the cloud so all participants in the network can immediately view and act on it. The offering also works with SAP Business Suite software and makes use of all on-premise data it contains.

The second one is SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand, a content service to manage the often painstaking and expensive process of creating regulatory documentation, freeing manufacturers from having to author their own safety data sheets. It takes the customers' product data, generates country-specific data sheets and labels in the cloud and then delivers the documents back to the customer. Keeping current with changes in global regulations, SAP estimates that the content service can decrease ongoing safety data sheet costs by up to 50 percent and free up precious resources to focus on more strategic projects.

"SAP uniquely can offer customers a powerful hybrid model that helps drive down costs of compliance while freeing up resources to focus on what matters most — strategic innovation," said Peter Maier, senior vice president, Energy and Natural Resources Solutions, SAP. "Our product safety solutions already touch 5 trillion dollars of all the world's manufactured goods. With so many customers across the supply chain already using SAP — and the strength of our combined cloud and on-premise strategy — we are playing a central role in creating a global business network that lets companies collaborate to run better and protect the triple bottom line."

Image credit: SAP