Grundfos keeps control of the chemistry
Sustainability is one of Grundfos’ core values, and combined with the ambition to deliver faster and better customer support within product chemical compliance, Grundfos decided to strengthen the assurance and documentation of compliance with relevant global chemical legislation.
When a company like Grundfos relies on a large number of subcontractors, it is crucial to ensure that all relevant chemical regulations are adhered to, so the final products are legal and approved for their intended use.
Grundfos collects and assesses information from all suppliers and has chosen to implement a dedicated IT system to handle all data. The system also ensures that data for each product is consolidated into a certificate documenting that the product meets the requirements of the relevant legislation.
Challenge
To document compliance with relevant chemical legislation across all markets and for all products, Grundfos collects information from all suppliers regarding any presence of particularly problematic chemical substances in their products and assesses this information in relation to the selected legislation. All suppliers are held to the same requirements.
As Grundfos sells its products globally and has many suppliers and factories, there was a need for better support of this process.
During the project, additional challenges emerged when one of the IT suppliers removed support for critical functionality on a platform, forcing Grundfos to find an alternative supplier mid‑project.
Solution
Based on Grundfos’ bills of materials (BOM), suppliers of subcomponents and materials are asked to report their compliance with the relevant chemical legislation.
The reporting is carried out in a cloud‑based third‑party solution. These data are then consolidated into one certificate per product per piece of legislation.
The chosen IT solution is new to the market, and as a first mover, Grundfos had to invest resources in testing and verifying both the solution and the master data on which it is built.
After an intensive implementation and testing phase, the project was able to deliver a fully functioning solution with an accompanying business and IT support organisation.
Result
Through a joint effort between the Grundfos organisation and the IT department, the team succeeded in identifying and resolving the major issues and gaps in the solution – both on the IT side and in the underlying data.
Grundfos is now in the process of collecting data from its suppliers and expects to be able to respond to customer enquiries much faster than before.
At the same time, the solution will contribute to product development, supplier collaboration and the maintenance of master data through increased transparency.
The project was initiated in 2015 and was successfully completed at the end of 2016.
