Complex multinational manufacturing compliance
Helping a leading multinational manufacturer keep up with compliance complexity and tackling three main challenges for global downstream corporations.
Services: Chemical Watch News & Insight, Regulatory Database & Professional Development
Enhesa Product Intelligence solutions
Global corporations working across multiple industries face some unique compliance challenges when navigating the increasingly complex regulatory landscape for chemicals management, including:
- Rising levels of regulation across the full product life-cycle.
- Working with suppliers not always familiar with global requirements.
- Multiple customer demands for products to meet requirements beyond compliance.
These are issues that many of Enhesa Product Intelligence’s large multinational clients tackle on a day-to-day basis and we help support, regardless of whether they operate in electronics, manufacturing or materials development. We recently spoke to one of our members, a leading North American multinational manufacturer, to discover how it successfully navigates these challenges. Here’s what we learned.
Challenge 1
Increasing levels of regulation
Simply keeping up with new regulatory and industry requirements is the greatest obstacle to compliance. The responsibilities for individual product safety employees often include not only ensuring compliance of the divisions that employee is aligned with, but also acting as subject matter experts within the business. This latter role requires analysis and sharing of information with colleagues on substances of concern, or specific and often evolving regulation.
As one product steward responsible for electronics in this global corporation notes below.
Solutions
To ensure its large compliance team stays on top of every regulatory change, this global corporation uses Enhesa Product Intelligence as its “first source” of information, relying on newsletters and lenses alerts as essential tools for staying informed.
“I have set up lenses by products, also regulations, industries we work in and topics such as mining and minerals. You can’t read everything so when I receive an alert, it’s easy to pick out the headlines important to me, and then read that story completely.”
[In the past two decades] we started with just RoHS, and then came REACH, California Prop 65, conflict minerals, TSCA and so on. There are always new requirements and it’s often difficult to stay up to date with the changes taking place and not miss an amendment.
Challenge 2
A complex supply chain where not all suppliers are global
A challenge for international businesses with global production is how to ensure its supply chain – which includes small businesses – can provide the information necessary for a global business to achieve full compliance wherever it’s selling products.
Solutions
To overcome this challenge, individual product stewards are equipped with the knowledge and expertise they need to manage and achieve global compliance. By using Enhesa Product Intelligence’s full range of services – Chemical Watch News & Insight, Regulatory Database and Professional Development – it has access to global regulatory and compliance intelligence across the wide range of industries in which it operates.
For a deep dive into one or more markets, it uses the Focused Compliance Solution, comprising regulatory data comparison tools such as RoHS.
With a full understanding of requirements on a market-by-market basis, individual product stewards can share the full picture with regional suppliers to ensure they can deliver what is needed.
Not everyone is really in a global supply chain. Regional suppliers often don’t do business directly in other regions, so they can be unfamiliar with the in-depth compliance questions that come up. For example, a supplier based in Europe isn’t always used to providing a TSCA statement.
Challenge 3
Customer demands for more than compliance
Even when global corporations can access the full regulatory picture for chemicals compliance, there are growing demands from their customers for additional information. The EU Green Deal, for example, is adding pressure on companies to know and communicate the chemical composition used in their products; and consumer businesses are pushing for transparency on a broad range of sustainability issues.
As a global corporation supplying consumer-facing brands, the future challenge is to pull together information that may be buried deep within the supply chain, and information that is often proprietary to suppliers.
Solutions
To help with this, Enhesa Product Intelligence has extended its services beyond chemicals to support compliance professionals with full product lifecycle compliance.
By adding product feature content sets on top of our Regulatory Database, we are building on our foundation of chemicals regulation coverage with new services that support a holistic and end-to-end view of product compliance.
The shift to proactive
For any business guided by innovation, the need to keep on top of regulatory changes has never been more important. Multinationals are leading the way with proactive compliance management, taking advantage of services and tools to empower individuals to create safer and sustainable products.
As this global corporation says:
Rather than being reactive and responding to compliance requests, we are now more proactive and forward thinking in how upcoming regulations may impact the business and what customers are asking for. Enhesa Product Intelligence services help us with staying current and our forward thinking.
Want a closer look at how we can help?
At Enhesa we are delighted to be the trusted partners of large multinational clients and to support the work of individuals in achieving compliance goals. It’s our mission to help organizations take a proactive approach to chemicals management and stay ahead of the fast-moving chemicals management industry.