DuPont fuels growth with strategic use of critical compliance and safety data throughout the business

Overview 

Since 1802, DuPont and its predecessor companies have met the worlds' need for innovative, high-performance products that transform industries and improve everyday lives. DuPont is at the forefront of essential advancements in water purification, medical care, personal protection, electronic vehicles, and more. The team at DuPont has consistently met the growing demand for safe, compliant, and sustainable chemical solutions. However, rather than merely reacting to market demands, DuPont is strategically leveraging chemical compliance, safety, and sustainability data to gain a competitive edge and drive their business forward.

With the help of 3E's world-class regulatory and chemical data solutions, DuPont utilizes critical chemical compliance and safety data across each stage of the product lifecycle. The result is an elevated ability to rapidly access data for the purposes of engineering innovative products, reaching new markets, enhancing transparency, deriving competitive advantage, and achieving greater safety for employees and customers.

Challenges 

Prior to 2011, DuPont employed a number of systems to manage chemical documentation and evaluate relevant regulatory updates. In 2011, DuPont deployed SAP EHS Regulatory Content (SERC) (now 3E ERC+) to help them author and manage a large volume of safety data sheets (SDS). In response to increasing external requirements, DuPont sought to streamline SDS authorship and management to ensure safe use of materials and comply with expanding regulations.

The chemical regulatory landscape continues to evolve with increasing global requirements in addition to the rise of adjacent sustainability initiatives and external ESG demands. “Chemical safety and protection of people and the environment are central to DuPont's Core Values. As such, effective product safety and stewardship are strategic elements of how we do business. We envisioned and worked to build the tools and processes to enable critical chemical and compliance information to be available across our organization to inform and enhance business decision-making,” explained Barbara Nyland, Corporate Product Stewardship and Regulatory Compliance Director at DuPont.

As the global compliance landscape has advanced, DuPont has expanded its partnership with 3E to address emerging challenges.

Achieving results

Transforming product stewardship, compliance, and supply chain transparency from siloed verification steps into a cross- functional strategic value center requires enhanced capabilities, extensive data, and scalability to support the product lifecycle of DuPont's growing portfolio of solutions.

Over the course of the last 15 years, DuPont has accelerated its investment in 3E's full suite of solutions to support an end-to-end compliance strategy. 3E Protect provides DuPont with chemical inventory and SDS management capabilities allowing DuPont's staff to instantly access more than 100,000 SDS at any time. 3E Notify was added to provide streamlined PCN capability.

Using 3E ERC+, DuPont is delivering chemical and regulatory insights into workflows across the company to make greater safety and sustainability a differentiator and market enabler. 3E ERC+ integrates seamlessly with SAP, DuPont's ERP system, streamlining compliance.

With 3E Insight, DuPont is able to keep pace with the rapidly evolving regulatory landscape. “We extensively utilize 3E Insight. Over the course of the last two years, our employees have submitted more than 45,000 queries. 3E's data on everything from substances of concern to upcoming regulations and horizon scanning is essential to our business,” said Nyland.

In fact, DuPont found 3E's chemical compliance data so reliable that it is core to a proprietary enterprise-level platform developed to support the research and regulatory needs of professionals like product stewards, risk assessors, toxicologists, chemists, and engineers. This system plays a key role in enabling chemical safety, regulatory compliance, and product stewardship across the product lifecycle.

A publicly available version of this powerful tool, Chemical Awareness Toolkit (CAt), is also powered by 3E. “It's critical that our teams have access to fundamental knowledge about materials and regulations early on in the formulation process. Our proprietary platform includes information on everything from toxicological hazards to occupational exposure limits, government regulations, and public perception. Our teams use this database to compare substances and understand their different attributes so that they can choose the best one for their particular project,” explained Nyland.

In pursuit of increased supply chain visibility, DuPont recently deployed 3E Exchange and is creating 3E Digital Product Passports for a preliminary list of 50 products. To avoid revealing proprietary trade secrets, DuPont is creating full, restricted product passports for the purposes of regulatory compliance, and a public product passport with key performance, sustainability, and material composition without revealing product details that could compromise DuPont's competitive advantage. 3E Exchange enables streamlined supplier data collection with flexible surveys, automated compliance checks, and robust data sharing capabilities. Collected data flows into 3E Digital Product Passports, allowing for secure data sharing throughout the supply chain with adjustable access settings, ensuring data is shared only with its intended recipients.

DuPont is committed to getting their spin-offs launched in a positive direction. Nyland noted, “Many of our spin-offs include DuPont employees who are experienced users of 3E solutions and they have a deep understanding of what these solutions can do. As a result, we try to arm spin-offs with 3E solutions to maintain continuity and to encourage the same level of compliance, product stewardship and sustainability best practices that we have established at DuPont.” With 3E's suite of solutions, these spin-off teams can establish a foundation of transparency and compliance to pave the path to success.

Results

DuPont continues to collaborate closely with 3E to achieve greater safety, sustainability, and compliance. “3E listens. We see our feedback and that of your other customers reflected in the value and capabilities coming into your new products.”

DuPont is pursuing integration of the 3E ERD with SAP S/4HANA, a project that is already underway and will deliver enhanced speed and efficiency to the team. “Sustainability and PS&R data are increasingly integrated,” said Nyland. “3E's tools are helping us validate, consolidate, and disseminate that data in a way that offers a single source of truth. The ability to work within an integrated system gives us access to critical information needed for granular reporting, informed decision-making, and confident compliance with increasingly complex regulations.”

Nyland's team is also continuing to refine the ways it delivers actionable data to teams to make it easy and compelling for them to factor in regulatory and chemical safety information into their everyday decision-making. “We know that the data coming in through 3E Insight is accurate and informs our decision-making so as to remain in compliance. As we expand our adoption to other 3E solutions like Notify and most recently, 3E Exchange, we really benefit from a fully integrated system. 3E's platform is straightforward, reliable and trustworthy,” explained Nyland.

DuPont continues to leverage 3E's award-winning data and advanced technologies to deliver safer, sustainability-advantaged products to market, creating a healthy business for DuPont and their customers.

“Utilizing 3E products, we've built upon and strengthened our foundation for safe and sustainable design principles at DuPont. Our teams are making smart material decisions early on, avoiding delays, expanding marketability of our products, and building trust among customers who know that their products that include DuPont components and materials are going to be safe and compliant in the markets where they are sold,” said Nyland.

Location: Global
3E Services: 3E ERC+ Suite for SAP, 3E Protect, 3E Exchange, 3E Insight, 3E Notify for Poison Centres – SAP
Industry/Market: Industrial
Company Web Site: www.dupont.com