By taking advantage of the orchestration between the on-demand content delivered by SAP and the on-premise SAP? Environment, Health, and Safety Management (SAP EHS Management) application, Dow Corning can maintain its core competency in silicon-based products and solutions and overall responsibility for product stewardship and chemical management regulations, while depending on SAP to efficiently provide product compliance data and documents to comply with widely varying local regulations.

Like many companies, Dow Corning is required to constantly monitor rapidly changing product safety regulations in emerging countries and apply the relevant changes to their product compliance documents. Even more challenging, the company must always be prepared to answer questions about the chemical composition and exposure scenarios for all its products. It must comply with country, state, and/or local regulations and provide correct, up-to-date information in various languages for hazard and regulatory classification and compliance documents. To add to the complexity, this information is constantly changing, making it difficult to keep up with the latest compliance laws in any given country.

Dow Corning’s decision to use SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand helps ensure that up-to-date and accurate regulatory requirements are reflected in the product compliance data and documents that are generated by the SAP solution. In addition, Dow Corning will benefit from the standardization of global processes and content, which will help reduce risks and allow the company to continue to avoid fines, product impoundment and product liability claims.

Expansion in Leaps and Bounds

Dow Corning has been managing product compliance since 1999 using SAP EHS Management. However, the growing complexity of new regulations, including Global Harmonized Standard and REACH, along with the business growth in countries outside of its historic bases of operation led to the decision to subscribe to SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand. The on-demand content service provides Dow Corning flexibility in addressing these demands, reduces compliance risk and allocates resources for the best value.

?“In such a complex business, we have long relied on SAP software and services to help us maintain compliance with global regulations,” said Peter Cartwright, vice president, Environment, Health & Safety, Dow Corning. “This additional step will enable us to focus our resources on other regulatory issues while SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand helps us to standardize the safety data sheet generation processes globally.”

Inside the Unique Business Process

To manage this undertaking, SAP will use the interoperable environment between Dow Corning's existing SAP EHS Management application and the back office at SAP that supports SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand. This back office is maintained and operated by SAP product compliance experts who manage the automated development of component and product hazard and regulatory classifications, safety data sheets, labels and tremcards (transportation emergency cards). These data and documents will be made available in the SAP EHS Management system at Dow Corning for use in other compliance tasks, such as REACH compliance, and document distribution to customers, with native integration with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application SAP? ERP also at Dow Corning.

Next Major Event: SAPPHIRE? NOW Conference

With SAPPHIRE? NOW, SAP offers customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders at the premier educational and networking event. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 15-18, 2011, the SAP customer conference connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit http://www.sapphirenow.com For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage leading up to and during the event, visit the SAPPHIRE NOW newsroom at http://www.sapphirenow.news-sap.com.