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Chemical Industry Excellence Award Winner - Lanxess
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Chemicals
Applicable Functions
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Regulatory Compliance Monitoring
Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
LANXESS Corporation’s Health, Safety, Environment and Quality (HSEQ) group supports global efforts to meet the highest safety standards covering more than 20,000 products in 52 production sites. The Pittsburgh HSEQ group is responsible for keeping all safety data sheets (SDS) current and compliant for 4,000 products in the United States, as well as for a few thousand more products produced in Canada and distributed in Mexico. They work together with other HSEQ groups in the EU, Brazil, China and Japan to author GHS compliant Safety Data Sheets in 39 different languages for destination countries around the world. The United States Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) has mandated that companies implement the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS).
About The Customer
LANXESS is a leading specialty chemicals company with sales of EUR 8.3 billion in 2013 and about 16,900 employees in 31 countries. The company is currently represented at 52 production sites worldwide. The core business of LANXESS is the development, manufacturing and marketing of plastics, rubber, intermediates and specialty chemicals. LANXESS Corporation is part of the German LANXESS-Group and employs around 1,000 people in the United States. As an international specialty chemicals group, LANXESS considers safety a top priority. The company’s success depends fundamentally on its plants running smoothly, cost-effectively and in full compliance with legal requirements.
The Solution
Several years ago, LANXESS Corporation had switched away from an SAP solution and standardized instead on Sphera Intelligent Authoring™ as its enterprise-wide system for maintaining all regulatory content and creating safety data sheets. Specifically, LANXESS customized section 15 of its SDS system to give its customers all of the information that they needed regarding compliance with GHS, California’s Proposition 65 and other local, state, federal and international mandates. For example, the company’s HSEQ team uses country-specific GHS classifications to address the differences between GHS implementations in various geographic areas, such as OSHA and CLP (European Union)3 , and then automatically create SDSs in the required languages.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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