Dow Corning Chooses SAP to Create Product Compliance Documents for 14,000 Products in 100 Countries

MIDLAND, Mich., May 3, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- In today's world of rapidly changing and increasingly complex regulations, companies are looking for a consistent and standard approach to help ensure product compliance. To help longtime customer Dow Corning stay compliant, reduce risk and minimize cost, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that the chemical manufacturer will rely on the new SAP® EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand content service to provide 100,000 safety data sheets in more than 30 languages for its 14,000 products sold in over 100 countries. 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 innovative 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.

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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.

"Our recent research benchmarking of over 200 global organizations showed that the top pressure in the industry today is to comply with environmental, health and safety regulations," says Matthew Littlefield, senior research analyst from the Aberdeen Group. "This research also showed that for best-in-class companies like Dow Corning, the real challenge is managing the sheer complexity of regulations in a global environment. Based on our experience with SAP and its customers, after this roll-out, Dow Corning should be well positioned to continue to improve compliance data collection from disparate sources, increase employee safety, reduce the cost of compliance, ensure product compliance and minimize supply chain disruptions due to potential non-compliance events."

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 extraordinary 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.

"To increase profitability and competitiveness, we see manufacturing companies focusing on growing and developing their core business rather than managing product safety communications," said Peter Graf, chief sustainability officer, SAP. "SAP can uniquely solve this challenge for customers by combining processes, software and content with expertise to provide an extensive and accurate global product compliance solution. We are seeing a growing trend in the orchestration of regulation and compliance management between on-demand and on-premise solutions, and we are very excited to be Dow Corning's vendor of choice for this important aspect of the business."

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 www.sapphirenow.com. For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage leading up to and during the event, visit the SAPPHIRE NOW newsroom at www.sapphirenow.news-sap.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW.

About Dow Corning

Dow Corning (dowcorning.com) provides performance-enhancing solutions to serve the diverse needs of more than 25,000 customers worldwide. A global leader in silicones, silicon-based technology and innovation, Dow Corning offers more than 7,000 products and services via the company's Dow Corning® and XIAMETER® brands. Dow Corning is equally owned by The Dow Chemical Company and Corning, Incorporated. More than half of Dow Corning's annual sales are outside the United States. Dow Corning's global operations adhere to the American Chemistry Council's Responsible Care® initiative, a stringent set of standards designed to advance the safe and secure management of chemical products and processes.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 170,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of Sybase) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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