The Bruno Bock Group labels its chemical products with the SAP®-integrated OPAL LABELMANAGEMENT™ – meeting worldwide GHS requirements as well as marketing’s design specifications.
THE COMPANY
A world leader in organosulfur chemistry
Perm or sleek look: anyone who wants to be on trend with their hair style often uses products from the Bruno Bock Group. The medium-sized company based in Marschacht near Hamburg, with a second production site in the USA, is the leading supplier of high-quality organosulfur products.
Under the Thiocare® H brand, the group sells active ingredients for hair-reshaping products for waving, straightening or hair removal.
THE CORE PROBLEM
Three months of seawater – the GHS regulations
Strict regulations apply to the worldwide transport of chemical mixtures, and they also affect labelling. The “Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals” (GHS) requires that hazardous-goods labels in maritime transport still be clearly legible even after three months in seawater – and resistant to chemicals and light exposure.
“These requirements cannot be met with conventional carrier films and printers.”
Fridhelm Wünnecke, IT Manager, Bruno Bock Chemische Fabrik GmbH & Co. KG
In 2016/2017, the team around Wünnecke therefore introduced unified label management for the entire group. Previously, the products from North America and Germany were labelled with different, largely manually created labels – within the group there were 17 label types. In the course of the project, the variety was reduced to seven types, which are applied to canisters, drums, IBC containers and large bottles.
“SAP® should provide the necessary label data as the single source. This significantly simplifies and speeds up the process and also avoids errors when transferring order data.”
Fridhelm Wünnecke, IT Manager
THE SOLUTION
SAP®-integrated – label data “on the fly”
The choice fell on OPAL LABELMANAGEMENT™: a SAP®-integrated labelling solution that generates all the necessary product and packaging data “on the fly” during the printing process.
“OPAL was able to offer us a complete system integrated into SAP® that had already proven itself at other chemical companies.”
Eckard Litzenberger, SAP specialist, Bruno Bock
- →High acceptance: users do not notice that they are operating outside SAP® when labelling – staff quickly got used to the new solution.
- →Automatically in sync: every change in the SAP® database structures is automatically reflected in OPAL LABELMANAGEMENT™.
- →Dynamic labelling: pictograms, signal words, hazard and precautionary statements are integrated depending on the substance and recipient country in the required language – based on transaction data, product master data and hazardous-substance data from SAP®.
THE PROJECT
Up and running in six months
The design of the labels according to corporate design guidelines was also part of the project. Here, the interface to the label-layout software BarTender by Seagull Scientific scored points (more on this here), which was already in use at the US sister company Evans Chemetics – the licence could be extended cost-effectively.
The two-colour thermal-transfer printers of the type CAB XC6 supplied by OPAL and the multi-layer polyethylene labels developed by OPAL ensure very high quality. The German site was switched over within only around six months; productive operation started on 1 June 2016. Eighteen months later, the rollout in the USA followed.
“Especially when setting up the CAB printers, OPAL was able to help us very well with extensive detailed knowledge, right down to the exotic character sets for East Asia.”
Fridhelm Wünnecke, IT Manager
CONCLUSION
Fewer errors, considerable time savings
The changeover went smoothly: all legal and design requirements are met, the error rate was significantly minimised through the SAP® integration, and handling was made easier for staff. Future changes are viewed calmly – if in future only trade marks rather than chemical names are to appear on the labels, that is implemented with a few mouse clicks.
→ Download the full case study here
Would you like to integrate your label management into SAP® too? Talk to us – we are happy to advise you.
OPAL – consulting, integration and support from a single source
