The semiconductor manufacturer, with several business units spanning three continents, lacked a consistent process for managing risk related to the thousands of products it produces. Each business entity had its own homegrown solution, leading to inconsistency in information across the enterprise. The semiconductor business is complex due to the variety of products and the many risk analyses performed at various levels. An unmitigated risk at the smallest level could have a huge impact on something at a much higher level. The company needed a centralized operational risk management solution.

Apache Corporation, one of the world's top independent Oil & Gas Exploration & Production companies, faced significant challenges in managing its materials data. The company's rapid expansion through a series of acquisitions between 1992 and 2012 resulted in operations spread across multiple regions. This led to excessive back-and-forth communication between the centralized catalog team and the regional business units to clarify local material requirements. The situation was further complicated by a lack of 24/7 availability and time zone issues that impacted service levels. In 2008, Apache deployed a single SAP instance with a focus on master data. However, data cleansing was ineffective due to a lack of standards and data governance. By 2010, poor data quality had created significant inventory management, reporting, and sourcing issues, leading to user dissatisfaction.

In 2014, CertainTeed made a strategic decision to consolidate its various ERP systems across its business divisions into a single instance of SAP - to also include SAP’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM). At the time of the decision, each business operated independently, often using their own management systems. There was little cooperation, and plants typically did not share data. CertainTeed recognized that to support their SAP implementation, they would need to consolidate and standardize their Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) material master data. This included the optimization of over 250,000 material records for 60 facilities across 5 divisions in the United States and Canada.

Bega Cheese®, an Australian dairy food manufacturer, had challenges monitoring and reporting environmental performance and sustainability achievements across its supply chain. It needed to collect sustainability data from all business units and integrate it into other internal systems for reporting. At varying levels in the organization and at varying intervals, it collected energy consumption, water consumption, wastewater and solid waste data. Bega Cheese was unable to easily track its sustainability performance or generate ad hoc reports in a timely manner with confidence in the quality of the data it collected. Bega Cheese’s initial software solution could only create a pre-determined, fixed set of reports and provided no way to create ad hoc reports requested by its stakeholders. For every exception, Bega Cheese had to return to the software provider to ask for customized reports, leading to additional cost and time expenditures.

Mapei, a leader in the production of adhesives and chemical products for the building industry, faced several challenges. They needed to provide environmental information in a reliable and transparent manner in response to market demands on products in relation to Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). They also needed to assess the performance of products in the design phase, reduce costs associated with the development of EPDs, and create effective communication messaging for the supply chain and consumers.

The apparel firm was facing several challenges in managing its chemical compliance systems and processes. The company was using manual systems and processes for managing chemical SDS information, including binder storage and manual label printing at each of their facility sites. This created critical issues in chemical data management, updates, and reporting. The firm was dealing with siloed and limited access to safety data sheet (SDS) documents through a paper-based system. The label-making and formatting were done manually. The company was using a large quantity and variation of chemicals in their manufacturing process. There was also a lack of insight on the environmental impact of these chemicals.

ista, a sub-metering company based in Germany, had set ambitious sustainability goals and needed to measure their success. For the annual collection of sustainability data, roughly 20 data sets from about 174 sites are collected, involving around 130 people. When the company decided to expand their sustainability initiatives, the existing approach was no longer adequate. Instead of focusing only on data collection and reporting, ista also needed to analyze the existing data to improve future performance. The challenges they faced included extensive and time-consuming data collection via Excel and email, plausibility checks required to improve data quality, and a lack of tools for analytics and advanced planning features.

Fater, a joint venture between Procter & Gamble and the Angelini Group, is committed to environmental sustainability and is constantly striving to understand and improve the environmental performance of its current and future products. The company faced several challenges in its sustainability journey. These included assessing the environmental impact of existing and new products, embedding eco-design in product development, especially in the choice of raw materials and type of packaging, quantifying the share of the use-phase emissions and providing retrospective guidance for product development, and supporting marketing claims with fact-based but easy-to-understand environmental indicators for transparent consumer communication.

OLYMP, a global apparel company, was faced with the challenge of improving the environmental performance of their packaging while maintaining functional requirements. They needed to calculate the environmental impact of different packaging types and identify a reliable and easy-to-use life cycle assessment (LCA) tool for packaging. They also required external results verification for transparent communication. The company aimed to meet the criteria for their sustainability flag GREEN CHOICE by 2025, which involved increasing the proportion of sustainably produced raw materials, reducing the use of critical chemicals, and establishing environmentally friendly processes in production.

YPF, a leading energy company, was looking to enhance transparency and provide stakeholders with a clearer view of their environmental and carbon data. Their existing collection system was technologically obsolete and Excel-based, which made it difficult to aggregate environmental emissions related to waste & water management and biodiversity data into a single repository. They wanted to transition from a manual process with separated data streams to an automated and unified reporting solution. The goal was to improve key performance indicators (KPIs) in sustainability, increase transparency for audit trails and provide more reliable data for stakeholders and investors.

The Co-op, a large consumer co-operative with interests across various sectors, was facing challenges in ensuring the safety of its workforce. The retail sector is vulnerable to a wide range of incidents, from workplace accidents to antisocial behavior, as well as the verbal abuse and physical assault of colleagues. To improve the safety culture, Co-op decided to establish a new incident reporting and management system, accessible to all colleagues and contractors. The safety strategy went beyond the collection and reporting of incidents and near misses. An important success factor for establishing a broad and efficient safety culture and protecting the workforce was to evaluate the collected data with advanced data analytics capabilities to spot underlying trends and risk profile sites, ensure compliance and enable better decision-making. Due to Co-op’s complex safety requirements and the need to cover all its stores, future-ready mobile technology was needed.

DEUTZ, a leading manufacturer of innovative drive systems, faced challenges in securing its supply chain and being risk aware. The company had integrated Sphera Supply Chain Risk Management into its global risk management within procurement, but realized that limited visibility into sub-tiers represented a significant risk of supply disruptions or shortfalls. In 2022, the focus was on meeting strong demand, fulfilling delivery obligations, and keeping supply chains up and running. At the same time, the German Supply Chain Act with special focus on human rights and environmental protection along the supply chain, drove companies such as DEUTZ to perform risk management and reporting for all suppliers. DEUTZ’s attempt at manual identification of sub-tier suppliers failed due to two significant hurdles: it did not meet the requirements of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and it involved a high expenditure of time, yet did not provide value to neither DEUTZ nor their customers.

Clariant, a leading specialty chemical company, recognized supply chain risk management as a megatrend that they would have to manage if they wanted to stay ahead of the competition. They wanted to secure their market position by cooperating with the right suppliers who didn’t pose a threat to their reputation, whether because of noncompliance with regulations, sustainability issues or other reasons. As a chemical company, Clariant can’t produce their products without all the supplies they need—even if that supply is only one tiny component of a much larger product.

In 2010, CenterPoint Energy stepped up to address one especially critical environmental management challenge facing US energy companies – global climate change. The company’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Program team began implementation of an enterprise-level Environmental Management System (EMS) that is significantly enhancing their ability to maintain compliance with mandatory government regulations as well as voluntary sustainability reporting. CenterPoint Energy had previously managed its environmental reporting processes with hundreds of spreadsheets that were separately developed and maintained at its many facilities. But, to meet more rigorous information management demands imposed by a new generation of regulations, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) GHG Mandatory Reporting Rule (MRR), and voluntary reporting to non-governmental organizations such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), senior managers realized that complying with these complex new requirements using spreadsheets would be inefficient and potentially risky.

Enginetics Aerospace Corporation, a leading provider of complex metal formed components and fabricated assemblies for the global aerospace industry, was seeking ISO 14001 certification. ISO 14001 is a framework that companies can follow to assure management, employees and other stakeholders that environmental impacts are being measured and improved. The certification would not only boost the company's reputation but also lower operating costs. However, the process of achieving this certification was challenging due to the need for accurate, timely Safety Data Sheets (SDS) information. Enginetics was already committed to ensuring compliance with other global mandates for product stewardship and sustainability, including Tier II chemical inventory reporting under the US Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), the Globally Harmonized System for Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS), and the European Union’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH). However, managing these compliance mandates manually was proving to be inefficient and prone to errors.

Lloyd’s Register, a world leader in assessing business processes and products for safety standards, sought to improve its client risk assessment meetings. The company wanted to interact more effectively with clients during these meetings and expedite follow-up actions. Previously, meeting notes had to be captured by the engineers and support specialists in the meeting. Data about the client’s specific risks, safeguards, recommendations, and actions would be entered into various word documents and spreadsheets. Afterward, all of that information would have to be manually combined into a single draft document and circulated to the team that had attended the meeting. Each attendee would have to spend additional time checking to see that information from their discussion had been captured correctly and included in this encompassing document. Consolidation of information could take days and people could not see each other’s comments until they were issued in a draft revision. Important points made during the meeting might even get lost in the process.

A decade ago, Repsol executives realized that increasing pressure from local regulators and rigorous European emissions legislation as well as from ESG investors meant that their company needed to establish more reliable and credible environmental management processes. Repsol’s legacy processes for calculating air emissions were disparate, labor intensive and time consuming. Each facility had its own process to create the required regulatory reports and documentation. Many consisted of a series of steps to copy information from source systems – such as PI, laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and production systems – then create and maintain hundreds of spreadsheets with all the necessary calculations and reports. Each process required a host of manual tasks, which had to be performed repeatedly by Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) staff. As a result, these facility-specific processes left room for human error and provided only limited visibility across the company.

SAMTEC, a manufacturer of specialized electronic components, was facing challenges in managing and monitoring its chemical materials due to the growth of the company and the expansion into new product lines. The company needed to ensure compliance with regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which required constant monitoring of certain chemicals used in their manufacturing processes. The DHS provides companies with a list of thresholds for quantities of selected chemicals that they are permitted to have on site at their facilities at any one time. If the aggregated amount of a restricted chemical reaches thresholds specified on the “Chemicals of Interest” list, then the company must report the variance to DHS. EPA’s Tier II inventory reporting for EPCRA is another threshold-based regulation that provides a limit (in pounds) of specified chemicals that may be managed over a reporting year. If a business operation exceeds that threshold, then the company must provide an annual report to EPA. SAMTEC was committed to ensuring compliance with these and other regulations by constantly monitoring and managing all of its chemical materials but the job was getting more difficult.

Spectra Energy, a FORTUNE 500 company, is one of North America's premier pipeline and midstream companies. It has a commitment to sustainable operations and has been recognized by a host of independent organizations for its efforts. To deliver on these commitments, the company relies on its Environmental Performance and Safety System (EPASS). It standardizes processes for collecting and managing an array of environmental, health and safety (EHS) data, and then shares key aspects of that information both inside and outside of the company. EPASS also supports methodologies for calculating and reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are consistent with accepted industry guidelines from the Global Reporting Initiative and World Resources Institute. The company faced a challenge when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) implemented its landmark Mandatory Reporting Rule, which applies to companies emitting 25,000 metric tons or greater of greenhouse gas emissions. Under current MRR’s Subpart C and Subpart W requirements, Spectra Energy initially was required to report combustion emissions data at 25 U.S. facilities.

Total Petrochemicals & Refining USA (TPRI) had an outdated proprietary software for management system auditing that was inefficient and costly. The software included over 1,500 questions, but any changes to these questions had to be made by the vendor for an hourly fee. This made the process of updating the system cumbersome and infrequent. Furthermore, the system was not integrated with the company's incident management and reporting software, Sphera Impact, which meant that audit findings had to be manually transferred from one system to another. This process was time-consuming and prone to errors. The situation worsened when the company upgraded its IT infrastructure, leading to functionality problems with the legacy auditing tool.

Vale, a global mining company, was striving to achieve best practices in risk management. The company’s operational risk management team had historically focused primarily on loss recovery, looking at how the cost of assets could be protected through insurance. In 2006, however, Vale’s risk managers saw that they needed to take a broader view by identifying potential events or circumstances that might impede their company from achieving its business objectives, assessing those issues in terms of their likelihood and magnitude, determining preventive or remedial actions, and then monitoring the progress of those actions to completion. The Operational Risk team at Vale recognized that the success of their evolving strategy would depend upon their ability to collect, aggregate and analyze vast quantities of information from across the company so they established a framework for integrated risk management.

Sipchem, a globally recognized chemical manufacturer in Saudi Arabia, has always been committed to safety and environmental responsibility. The company continually works to follow international standards and improve processes surrounding safety, health, the environment, and security. In 2011, it became the first chemical manufacturing company in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to achieve the prestigious Responsible Care® certification. However, by 2011, the company was looking to take the next step. It wanted to adhere to industry best practices by implementing a new Management of Change (MOC) solution to improve its ability to ensure that the recommended changes were completed and implemented properly. The company had previously used several simple workflow systems to manage change. While these solutions could manage basic workflows, they were not designed by plant safety experts and lacked the sophistication to handle the change management processes and sub-processes necessary for chemical plants.

Eglin Air Force Base, the largest base in the U.S. Air Force, conducts a wide range of mission-critical activities, many of which involve the use of chemical materials and generate waste materials. These materials are regulated under local, state, and federal environmental, health, and safety (EHS) regulations. In addition, base personnel must maintain compliance with Air Force standards, some of which are even more stringent than comparable federal government mandates. The challenge was to implement a material management system that would meet USAF Mission Readiness requirements, comply fully with federal, state, and military EHS regulations and ISO 14001 standards, and minimize the burden of compliance processes on base operations, aligning with overall goals.

The U.S. Military Maintenance Facility (IMF) is responsible for maintaining and modernizing the fleet of submarines. The maintenance process involves the use of many materials classified as hazardous, so effectively managing these materials is critical to worker safety and regulatory compliance. The HazMat team is responsible for the inventory of approximately 1,100 types of hazardous materials. The team coordinates the annual distribution of $885,000 worth of hazardous materials to approximately 90 civilian shops that perform the work on its transport vehicles. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) has the overall responsibility for the management of the Hazardous Material Management System (HMMS) program for the Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal government facilities. DLA requires an enterprise solution to manage Hazardous Material (HM) and Hazardous Waste (HW).

Meridian, a renewable energy company, was faced with increased stakeholder interest in its own energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The company wanted to move to best-practice carbon and energy reporting and saw a growing need to provide more accurate reports on emissions as well as credible reduction initiatives. This would help to communicate with key stakeholders in a confident and authentic manner. However, Meridian’s GHG accounting system was a spreadsheet-based solution requiring manual data entry, multiple checks and re-checks and frequent requests to update data. It was an inefficient system that posed credibility risks through data integrity issues and made analysis difficult.

Whirlpool Corporation, a global manufacturer of home appliances, faced several challenges. They needed to quantify the environmental impacts of their products throughout their entire life cycle to improve their environmental performance. They also wanted to integrate environmental KPIs among the main drivers of product development. Furthermore, they aimed to identify potential areas of improvement and hotspots that needed to be addressed in a conscious PCR development for refrigerators.

Interface, a global market leader in developing and manufacturing modular textile floor coverings, has been committed to sustainable action through its Mission Zero®. The company has been using GaBi software since 2001 to conduct life cycle assessments (LCAs) for its products. LCAs take into account the entire life cycle of a carpet tile, from raw material extraction, production, and transportation, to use by the customer, care, and disposal. The challenge was to identify the environmental impacts at each of these stages and pinpoint areas with the greatest potential for improvement in terms of transparency, innovation, product portfolio, cost savings, and risk management.

ANTER, a non-profit organization, aimed to generate awareness of personal environmental responsibility through the 'Voluntary Chart of the Sustainable Citizen' initiative. They wanted to create a user-friendly platform that enables families to understand their Environmental Footprint and the consequences of daily habits and choices. The challenge was to differentiate from available Environmental Footprint Calculators, assuring a scientific basis. They also needed to present the initiative and the tool within a short timeframe.

FONA International, a company that creates 500 to 600 new flavors a month for clients, was facing a challenge with the documentation of potential chemical hazards on a Safety Data Sheet (SDS). The company was operating in a competitive industry where the ability to send samples in a timely manner could be the difference between winning a contract or not. However, it was equally important to comply with any pertinent regulatory safety-related requirements. The company was manually creating labels in many different languages depending on the country the product would be sold in. Each sample required its own SDS, which was a time-consuming process. The company also had to meet the requirements of the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS), a system set up by the United Nations to standardize the definition of what constitutes a chemical hazard.

Lorenz Meters, a German company that produces over 1 million high-quality water meters annually, has developed an innovative circular economy business model to sustainably offer customized products for metering services, water utilities, and industrial applications. However, the company faced several challenges. They needed fact-based proof of the environmental performance of their circular business model and quantification of the environmental impact over the entire product life cycle. They also required data-driven insights into Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and identification of improvement potential for the further development of the circular business model.