101 Guide: Lenses and Registers

In a recent webinar demonstration on creating and leveraging Lenses and Registers, Global Product Compliance Manager, Stacey Bowers, and Technical Knowledge Analyst, Edgar Lima, detailed how companies can use these features to enhance their regulatory compliance management.  

In this article, we define the benefits of using Lenses and Registers, and draw attention to the customer challenges these functionalities can tackle to help companies make more informed decisions on their chemicals, materials, and overall product compliance across various sectors and industries.

What are Lenses?

Lenses are customizable tools that allow businesses to focus on regulatory information related to specific regions, topics, or aspects of compliance to ultimately streamline the tracking and monitoring of changing regulations.  

For example, Lenses can be tailored to specific regulatory needs, including: 

• Chemical management, such as UK and EU REACH or US TSCA 
• Classification and labeling requirements, such as EU CLP and Safety Data Sheets (SDSs) 
• Extended producer responsibility (EPR) for batteries, electronics, and packaging materials 
• Packaging obligations and food contact materials (FCMs) mandates 
• Pre-market obligations, such as chemical notifications and registrations, licensing, permitting, and certifications 
• Sustainable chemistry, including biodegradability, circular economy, and the EU’s chemicals strategy 

And much more. 

Users can also opt for alerts to updates in their chosen Lenses, ensuring they’re up to date on regulatory changes in their selected topics, sectors, or regions, upcoming and imminent deadlines, and emerging requirements. Alerts can be customized to every day or week, for example. 

Lenses collate global regulatory data to ensure accurate, up to date information to minimize the risks of non-compliance and ensure business leaders can react proactively to changes.
 

Best practices for creating Lenses

1.Define business objectives 

Tailor the Lenses’ focus to the relevant region your business operates in, the industry most affected, or the aspects of compliance you’re most concerned with.

2. Use filters 

Leverage customizable searches for more precise results, saving time on scouring irrelevant sources. Use “and” and “or” in searches to tailor them to specific needs.

3. Set real-time alerts 

Take advantage of automated notifications to ensure you’re always receiving the most up to date regulatory changes as they occur, in your chosen topic or sector. This will also allow companies to regularly review and update existing and evolving regulations they’re tracking.

4. Encourage team collaboration 

Share the chosen Lenses with relevant teams across the organization for collective input, ensuring all colleagues, employees, and stakeholders are working collaboratively with the same knowledge. 

What are Registers?

Registers are centralized platforms which help businesses manage global legal obligations, ensuring accurate tracking of compliance requirements across multiple industries and regions. Only available as a feature within Regulatory Database, these structured tools allow businesses to manage and track the laws impacting their products and operations.  

With Registers, you can: 

• Create regulation lists 
• Add comments 
• Assign reviews 
• Control access and permissions 

Registers support ‘corporate memory’, enabling the main administrator to grant other team members permissions, retaining the same knowledge across an organization.
 

Best practices for creating Registers

1. Enhance customizability 

Make use of the enhanced customizability, tailoring Registers to specific regions, industries, and legal obligations to keep track of what’s most relevant for your business, ensuring comprehensive coverage.

2. Preserve corporate memory 

Maintain control over the viewing permissions for Registers, utilizing comments to tag team members into the conversation, encouraging input from across the organization. Moderate the permissions to ensure only relevant people are engaging with the information, defining roles for management. 

3. Track changes 

With the extent of control, business or project leaders can maintain a transparent audit trail and regularly review the Registers for accuracy.

What challenges are businesses facing?

What challenges are customers and clients in the product compliance space currently facing, that tools like Lenses and Registers can help them overcome? 

• Rapid regulatory change — businesses are having to manage rapid change in the regulatory environment. For example, manually tracking evolving laws for hazardous substances across regions, such as EU REACH or US TSCA, is time-consuming and prone to error and compliance gaps. 

• Complex compliance requirements — companies operating in multiple regions must navigate varying regulations across local and regional legislation, some of which may contrast and differ across jurisdictions. For example, labeling and safety standards for products in Europe may be wholly different to those in Asia, forcing companies to track varied regulatory requirements. This can increase the risks of compliance gaps. 

• Tracking compliance deadlines — different regions will have varying deadlines for registrations and certifications for products to go to market, meaning companies need to find ways to keep track of the regional different to avoid penalties for missing deadlines. 

• Maintaining corporate memory — maintaining a centralized and up to date repository of compliance knowledge across the business can be tricky. This is exacerbated when employees leave the company — and their specific library of knowledge leaves with them, having not been passed on to existing colleagues. Not having a holistic corporate memory can potentially lead to gaps in compliance. 

How can Lenses and Registers be used to tackle these challenges?

In the webinar on mastering these functions, Stacey Bowers discussed an anonymous case study where Enhesa Product Intelligence’s Lenses and Registers features helped Chemicals Inc navigate the evolving landscape.
 

The challenge 

Chemicals Inc struggled with tracking evolving global regulations, leading to compliance risks and missed market opportunities. 

To overcome this barrier, Chemicals Inc identified a need to centralize their regulatory monitoring, set up automated alerts for changes in relevant regulations, and encourage further collaboration with experts and stakeholders to enhance corporate memory and improve their compliance processes.
 

The solution 

We helped Chemicals Inc develop customized Lenses focusing on their specific region, labeling requirements, and compliance deadlines. Using enhanced search functionality for precise searches, we could set up notifications for relevant changes aligning with the company’s preferences. In this case, Chemicals Inc wished to track the regulatory updates to the substance ethanol, and so received daily alerts.  

Lenses supported real-time compliance monitoring, configuring automated alerts to notify the company’s stakeholders of: 

• Upcoming deadlines 
• Regulatory changes 
• Non-compliance issues 

This offered the opportunity to plan proactively, adapting relevant products or processes accordingly, and ultimately minimizing the risk of fines or sanctions from non-compliance with enforced regulations.  

To improve Chemicals Inc’s compliance management, Registers were integrated to provide a centralized approach with specific laws across various regions and product lines. These Registers were customized to the company’s region and industry, ensuring a complete and comprehensive view of the regulatory landscape relevant to their products.
 

The results  

From combining the use of Lenses and Registers, Chemicals Inc reported enhanced collaboration across their company, with teams working effectively to maintain a corporate memory. The features also supported their proactive adaptation to regulatory challenges, staying up to date on relevant changes in their chosen topic, substance, and region.