Sphera was proud to be a Gold sponsor of the SAP International Conference for Chemicals, which took place April 27-29, 2021. Following the recent SAP NetWeaver certification announcement, it was with great pleasure that we were accepted to share how Sphera can unlock the full potential of customers SAP EH&S data.
Martina Frenette, Sphera’s senior regulatory analyst, as well as John Falk, president of opesus, a Sphera partner, shared best practices to accelerate corporate compliance initiatives. Regardless of disparate siloed systems and poor-quality data, organizations can fast track their product compliance initiatives using preconfigured data and rules. The following is an edited transcript of the session from the conference.
Regulatory Complexities
When you’re navigating the complexities of global chemical regulations, the right combination of technology and managed regulatory content is critical to maintaining compliance.
Industry must comply with a variety of international, national, regional regulations such as lists of controlled/banned chemicals, national inventories, substances product registration (like the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals [REACH]), transport regulations, local requirements to report products on inventory (Community Right to Know) as well as industry standards (like the titanium dioxide had many trade organizations giving input to their members on how to best address the regulatory requirement) and customer specific requirements.
To make matters more challenging, emerging regulations are requiring the development of new tools and robust regulatory content as well as restructuring of data. In the simplest term, regulations are becoming more sophisticated.
All Content Is Not Created Equally
Content might mean different things to different people. When we talk about content, it is much more than chemical substances and property data. It is about:
- Having experts monitor and analyze regulatory changes while delivering rules and logic to automate classification and assessment of products according to regulatory jurisdiction.
- Having experts monitor, maintain and update lists of regulated chemicals that include a wide range of data to support screening and classification of products.
- Having a rigorous quality and validation process to deliver and maintain translated phrase, Exposure Scenario Communication (EsCom) phrases for a wide array of templates and forms.
- Connecting content and technology—with application-ready updates to data, rules, templates and logic—to automate the classification process of products and the generation of Safety Data Sheets (SDS) and other compliance-related documents.
Sphera content is much more than substance data. It is truly an all-encompassing set of information required to streamline and automate a client’s product compliance program.
Data and SAP Technology
Regulations are becoming more complex than they have ever been, and with the extensive data requirements that we are seeing, it is more important than ever to have a full spectrum of content including data, rules, templates and logic to truly automate the classification process of products and the generation of SDSs and other compliance documents. Users also need transparency tha gives them the ability to understand how the data is being used (audits) and the flexibility to change how it is being used.
Another important criterion is ensuring that regulatory content data and rule logic required for automation reside within SAP EH&S, which is the case with Sphera’s Product Compliance solution. Sphera provides the content for the phrase library and substance regulatory data (Chemical Abstracts Service [CAS] and U.N. dangerous goods [DG] data), complex rule logic and audits (for more than 80% of our rules), Windows Word (processor) Integration (WWI) templates and generation variants that all resides within SAP EH&S. This ensures that your business processes are streamlined and maximizes efficiency.
Streamlining Your S/4Hana Cloud Journey
Sphera’s solutions ease deployment or upgrades to S/4HANA cloud for our clients by:
- Utilizing a well-proven deployment model to minimize deployment time.
- Providing out-of-the box configuration to minimize customizations.
- Validating functionality in the latest releases of S/4HANA.
With each release, the Simplification Database gets updated before performing regression testing (i.e., SAP updates the Simplification Database to include new checks that might be specific to more recent S/4 HANA versions).
Sphera is a partner in the SAP PartnerEdge® program. The program provides the enablement tools, benefits and support to facilitate building high-quality, disruptive applications focused on specific business needs quickly and cost-effectively. The program provides access to all relevant SAP technologies in one simple framework under a single, global contract, which allows users to crack open a treasure-trove of key EHS&S information.