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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.

Siemens, a global Fortune 500 company, faced a major business challenge due to the confluence of two major regulatory changes becoming effective on the same date. The U.S. OSHA adoption of the United Nations Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS) framework as its standard for hazard communication combined with the enforcement of the EU GHS regulation on mixtures meant Siemens had to reassess and reclassify over thirty-five hundred products by the June 1, 2015 regulatory deadline. Non-compliance would have created an extreme business disruption since Siemens would have been unable to sell its products in several markets. The GHS implementation project formally began in 2014 and leveraged software, content and expertise from Sphera to help them facilitate the transition.

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.

Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), New Jersey’s oldest and largest investor-owned utility provider, was facing a growing burden of regulatory mandates regarding air, water, and waste emissions. The company was committed to ensuring full compliance with these regulations, but the proliferation of mandates was becoming increasingly challenging. Each of PSEG's plants had its own set of systems, often heavily customized and specific to local operations, and used its own methods to manually compile reports on its environmental performance. This resulted in a fragmented and inefficient system. Furthermore, the knowledge of exactly how information was being captured and aggregated typically remained with a single environmental professional at each plant, creating a risk in cases of staff turnover.

Santee Cooper, South Carolina's largest power producer, faced increasing pressures from stricter environmental regulations and internal changes such as employee retirements. The company had a large number of paper forms, spreadsheets, and databases across the company, and needed a central database for consistent and accurate environmental information. The reporting needs had increased and there were more regulations in the pipeline with final rulings coming. The company needed an Environmental Management Information System (EMIS) to manage the current requirements more efficiently and deal proactively with the next generation of environmental demands. Furthermore, the company was undergoing operational adjustments due to organizational and personnel changes, including the shutdown of four coal-fired generating units, which required a lot of change with roles, responsibilities, and people all being shifted between various stations and locations.

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 Red River Army Depot (RRAD) is a large-scale production complex that serves as an ammunition depot storage site and maintenance facility for various military vehicles. Many of its storage and maintenance processes require the use of numerous chemicals or materials that generate significant quantities of waste. RRAD’s Environmental Division staff members carefully track and manage thousands of transactions involving material receipt, inventory and waste generation to assure full compliance with state, federal and U.S. Army regulations. The challenge was to manage a high volume of hazardous materials and waste in compliance with state, federal and military regulations, provide up-to-the-minute visibility into the status and location of materials & waste onsite, and identify opportunities to reduce materials inventory, thereby eliminating the need for waste disposal.

The pharmaceutical company, with clinical research conducted in more than 50 countries and manufacturing plants in over 12 countries, identified an opportunity to improve current processes with the goal of reducing product defects across its worldwide operations. The company lacked a centralized tool to capture requirements or to conduct risk assessments for hundreds of their products within many product families. As a result, in order to meet regulatory guidelines, the company maintained multiple spreadsheets as well as Process Flow Documents which were over 100-pages long for each product family! This created a very complex and cumbersome process. In addition, since the information was contained in multiple sources, there were no linkages between the requirements and controls, and the content was difficult to search and query. It also meant reliance on a few experts who could assess the relationships between all these elements.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Santex SpA, a major player in the Italian market for the production of medical devices, was seeking to improve the energy performance of the company and the environmental impact of its products. To achieve this, Santex implemented a management system in compliance with ISO 50001 requirements for Energy Management and ISO 14040 and 14044 for LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) and EPD® (Environmental Product Declaration) processes. These processes were actively used by Santex to evaluate, monitor and improve environmental performance. However, the company faced challenges in generating Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) autonomously and rapidly for new products.

The Zircon Industry Association (ZIA) needed a way to conduct Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in line with the most recognized and up-to-date methodologies and using industry-specific data. They wanted to use LCA as a strategic tool for zircon producers to benchmark with industry averages and to set continuous improvement goals. They also wanted to provide an informed supply chain with an accurate and independently-verified LCA, clearly showing that the very low environmental burden of zircon makes it the preferred choice as far as life cycle environmental performance is concerned. This would help to underpin ZIA member companies’ sustainability profile and provide additional communication opportunities throughout the value chain, including building designers and users of ceramic tiles.

Tata Steel, Europe’s second largest steel producer, has been using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for 16 years to support the development of its products and to contribute to industry-wide efforts to establish standards for sustainability, particularly in the automotive, construction, and packaging sectors. However, the company faced challenges in understanding how steel performs compared to other materials such as aluminium, concrete, timber, and carbon fibre. They also needed to use LCA studies as a marketing tool to support their supply chains and to support decision making in product development. Another challenge was identifying hot spots in the steel value chain so that efforts to reduce a product’s carbon footprint, water footprint, and energy use can be directed to where they will have most effect.

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.

The Italian Ceramics Industry, represented by Confindustria Ceramica, was faced with the challenge of tackling an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) project that represented 82.6% of Italian ceramic tile production. The industry needed to communicate the environmental performance of Italian ceramic tiles in an objective and transparent manner, while emphasizing sustainability activities and investments. They also needed tools to qualify for green building rating schemes (LEED, DGNB, BREEAM) and Italian green public procurement bidding procedures (CAM). The industry was also looking to identify potential improvement areas and projects for better environmental performance of products and support individual companies in product-related environmental reporting.

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.

Aptar, a global leader in the design and manufacturing of a broad range of drug delivery, consumer product dispensing, and active packaging solutions, faced several challenges related to sustainability. The company was struggling with the identification of climate-related risks and opportunities and the application of the TCFD (Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure) methodology. They also needed to benchmark their performance against competitors regarding the assessment of climate-related risks and opportunities. Quantifying the financial impact of these risks and opportunities was another challenge. Lastly, they needed to communicate their sustainability performance to investors and customers through recognized programs like TCFD and CDP.

The global pharmaceutical company was facing challenges in managing quality risk and reducing product defects. The transition from conventional to biopharma drug production had made compliance more complex and traceability crucial. The company was using spreadsheets and extensive process flow documents to conduct risk assessments for hundreds of products. This process was complex, cumbersome, and difficult to query. The elements of the process were not clearly linked, making the investigation of complaints burdensome and expensive. The company was dealing with disparate risk assessment processes across more than 62 countries, using time-intensive, manual reporting tools, and had an ineffective complaints analysis process.

BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, was using decentralized tools like Word and Excel to document process hazards. As a result, documentation was inconsistent and data extraction was cumbersome. Gathering strategic insights required experienced staff to review long, 300-page reports. The company had limited visibility of risk across the global organization, which was a significant challenge.