Celanese centralizes global hazard communications with The WERCS - Case study
The Situation
Celanese Corporation is a global producer of industrial chemicals, high-performance polymers and acetate fibers. The company has more than 9,000 employees with operations in North America, Europe and Asia. Since 2000, Celanese has relied on The WERCS to provide material safety data sheet (MSDS) authoring and managing capabilities in North America. As Celanese expanded globally, it realized that to improve business process efficiencies, it needed to consolidate all hazard communication to one central software solution.
The Challenge
Celanese maintained a system in the U.S. and in Europe to author and manage MSDS. By using the two software systems, it created errors due to duplicate data entries, increased operating costs and led to inconsistencies in MSDS content. In addition, the system in Europe was unable to address the expanding language and label creation requirements. Celanese understood that centralizing hazard communication to one system would create challenges associated with format design, agreement on data elements and consensus on phrases.
The Response
Celanese evaluated many options, which included status quo, centralizing to the European system and choosing The WERCS to manage its global MSDS authoring and distributing needs. After careful review of all options, in 2004 Celanese expanded globally with UL The Wercs. The decision was based on UL The Wercs’ 20 years of hazard communication experience, global implementation expertise, advanced functionality, customer references and a five year working relationship with Celanese in the U.S.
The Result
Since UL The Wercs had experience working with Celanese, there was little learning curve, which led to a shorter and faster implementation. One of the major benefits to using UL The Wercs was its central database architecture. By centralizing all formulation data and company specific phrases, UL The Wercs was able to seamlessly interface with Celanese’s global ERP system (SAP), there by creating an end-to-end authoring, managing and distributing system for MSDS.
UL The Wercs also:
- Enabled seamless MSDS authoring in both North American and Europe
- Maximized the number of common data elements such as country specific phrases and texts
- Created templates for families of products to simplify MSDS authoring in multiple languages including European and Asian
- Customized PhraseWercs to ensure consistency in MSDS and simplify editing phrases to accommodate multi-lingual capabilities
- Showed MSDS revisions by date, color and revision number
Through UL The WERCS, Celanese was also able to easily distribute its MSDS. The company could print to multiple regions and post MSDS on the company’s intranet site. UL The Wercs has saved Celanese substantial time and money and has helped it to advance global and regulatory compliance.
The Technology
UL The Wercs has become the established global standard for the automation of the Authoring, Distributing and Managing of Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) and other hazard communication documents. Recommended as the best of breed software for Regulatory Compliance, by The Gartner Group, UL The Wercs continues to advance regulatory compliance for major Fortune 500 companies around the world.
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