The goal of the “E2E – Material Usage Compliance Program” is to make sure FST offers clean, non-hazardous products – and meet that objective efficiently.
When Dr. Meike Rinnbauer talks about “safe materials” and “safe products,” she is not necessarily referring to handling or quality issues. To her, “safe” means that all the raw materials in use, especially chemicals, satisfy the relevant legal standards. “The goal is to develop materials that comply with current and future regulations and guidelines,” she said. As Global Process Owner (GPO) Material Compliance at Freudenberg Sealing Technologies (FST), she deals with these matters every day.
In practice, guaranteeing this “material compliance” is anything but easy. The number of national and international regulations and guidelines is growing steadily worldwide. The issues call to mind the 10,000 per- and polyfluorinated (PFAS) chemicals that are drawing attention today. PFAS are persistent, meaning that they do not degrade in the environment. Some are dangerous or suspected of causing damage to people and the environment.
REACH is the European body of rules governing the registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemicals. It is a regulatory regime to which FST pays the greatest possible attention. Rinnbauer’s position on REACH could not be clearer: “Material compliance is not simply ‘nice to have.’ It is a ‘must.’ We have to guarantee that our materials, and the products made from them, meet the legal requirements in the respective sales markets,” This is true “end to end” (E2E), from the raw material to the product, and from the compound’s development to its disposal.
New E-Learning Course
It is all the more important to have processes that guarantee compliance with the law. FST is delving deeply into these matters with its “E2E – Material Usage Compliance Program.” But there is a flip side: These efforts require well-informed employees throughout the company who are aware of their personal responsibility. A newly designed e-learning program is expected to increase awareness of these issues and help to close gaps in knowledge. It is expected to begin late this year.
Back to processes: In lean workshops in recent months – six in the United States, one in Germany – teams led by Jeanne Dellinger have taken a close look at how the seven FST facilities are meeting their material compliance obligations. Dellinger, the E2E Business Process Manager, is an expert on product lifecycle processes. Based on these reviews, so-called “to-be” processes are being developed over the next few months. The basic idea is that a harmonization or standardized process would emerge. It would create the foundation to improve, and more fully automate, process steps FST-wide.
One Compound – One Material Number
One of FST’s challenges relates to the fact that materials in the SAP system – depending on the form into which they are processed or further processed in a lead center – are not uniformly labeled. If the materials are in the form of a cord, strip, plate or semi-finished product, they carry a different SAP item number. Until now, compliance attributes such as REACH or RoHS (for the use of certain hazardous material in electric and electronic devices) have been assigned individually to each of these numbers again and again. And it has been done manually – which is labor-intensive and prone to error.
A solution based on so-called “umbrella compounds” has been identified. It involves networking the existing FST elastomer database with the SAP system. Irrespective of any ongoing processing, a material is always tied to its original article number and to all related information. A “cleansing” process for the project is now underway. “As a first step, we need clean data so the information can be carried over,” Rinnbauer said.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalization are expected to help manage the flood of material compliance issues. They should also help to reduce the number of process steps and increase standardization. That is the path to an efficient, compliant operation under a wide range of existing and new regulations and guidelines, Rinnbauer said.
For example, there could be a chatbot to answer associates’ questions about REACH, and IT systems could calculate a material’s CO2 footprint. The first stage involves the use of intelligent software to automate manual activities in the process chain, guaranteeing consistent, secure processes.
