Podcast Transcription:
How BPX is Helping SAP Customers Achieve REACH Compliance -
A BPX Community Podcast with Kieran O'Connor of SAP AG
Hosted by Jon Reed of JonERP.com
Podcast Interview Date: June 20, 2008
Podcast: Listen Now!

Jon Reed: Hi, welcome to this special SAP BPX community podcast. I'm your host, Jon Reed of JonERP.com, and joining me today is Kieran O'Connor, who is the Communications Lead with the Process Industry cluster at SAP AG. In this podcast, we're going to take a look at how the BPX community is impacting the chemicals industry. In particular, with the REACH compliance initiative in Europe, BPX is helping to save SAP customers money and improve their business processes. I see this as a great model for how SAP's online communities are actually impacting the bottom line for SAP customers, and I'm eager to learn more about it from Kieran today.

Kieran, let's kick off by hearing about your role at SAP and how you first got involved in REACH compliance work.

They're also looking for validation from customers, partners, consultants, etc. This was kind of the broad overview of my initial involvement with REACH compliance and, to that extent, we've created a few different spaces within BPX and the sister platform in order to facilitate this.

Reed: For those listeners who aren't familiar with REACH compliance, can you tell us how this standard came about and which countries it applies to?

O'Connor: It is quite broad legislation. The REACH legislation itself is an acronym for Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals. Despite the name, even though it explicitly sounds as though it's just specifically for the chemicals industry, this legislation has a broad range because it touches oil and gas, consumer products, quite a large number of industries. It's based on EU directives that were drafted and came into force in 2007, and really what they're talking about is registering and restricting, evaluating and authorizing around 30,000 different substances to make them compliant to ensure safety and also traceability of these substances.

Even though these are EU directives, it doesn't only affect companies within Europe: it also affects companies that are doing business with European companies because any substances that are imported within the EU also have to comply with this legislation, so it's quite broad ranging.

Reed: You tripped me up there on 30,000 substances - that is a massive undertaking.

O'Connor: It certainly is, it's not to be balked at. I think there's an estimate that within the first three years of compliance with the legislation, the average company is looking at upwards of 15,000 compliance projects, so it's a fairly daunting prospect for companies in this area.

Reed: I take it that SAP presents a great platform for addressing all these 30,000 entries within SAP's scope, so I wanted to find out which areas of SAP are tied into REACH compliance and also about SAP's partner, TechniData, that is also involved here.

O'Connor: The REACH compliance solution itself relies on the portfolio that lies within the EH&S solutions that SAP has provided for the past number of years. Indeed, the partner, TechniData, has been working with SAP on a lot of these EH&S solutions going back over 10 years, so TechniData not only works with our industry unit here in chemicals in SAP, but across the process industries.

Reed: Now we move into the part of the podcast I was really looking forward to: how the BPX community is playing an active and successful role in helping SAP customers to achieve REACH compliance. Can you tell us more about how the BPX community is helping customers make the process changes they need to become compliant?

O'Connor: The great thing about BPX is that you're reaching a wide audience, but because they separate themselves into communities voluntarily, then by just talking to people through BPX you're really targeting an expert group in a specific field. When we look at REACH, the initial blogs that went out about REACH date back to early to mid-2007 where the initial discussions about REACH compliance and the implications of the legislation at the time were discussed in a couple of blogs between our chemicals product owner in REACH compliance here, Marko Lange, and a TechniData colleague, Karl-Franz Torges.

Since then, we've been able to just extend our scope of experts through BPX by creating a few blogs, and they're pointing to some of the implications of the legislation and also pointing to the - at the time it was the compliance solution in development - and subsequently set up Roundtables.

Now a Roundtable is a separate environment: it's in parallel with BPX, but it enables us to set up a hosted area where the REACH experts, consultants, customers, and ecosystem partners can actually get in there, look at the breakdown of the REACH compliance legislation, look at the solution, look at business processes in their companies if they're coming from the customer community, or at their clients' business processes if they're coming from the extended ecosystem, and just look at ways of how the compliance solution can help them.

The Roundtable itself is an online forum, and it's public, by the way, so it enables anyone with an interest in the REACH legislation and the REACH compliance solution to actually get in there to look at and evaluate the discussions of others, to lend their support, to download documents and presentations, and also just to look at future releases of the REACH compliance solution, to perhaps look at further challenges down the road and help in that way. It enables us to have an enormous project that, if you were to take it offline, would involve so many logistics, and put it in an area online in a virtual community and have it discussed very efficiently, very smoothly and obviously without the travel costs involved.

Reed: SAP put out some customer stories about REACH and BPX, and the stories talked about how the BPX community can help to achieve clarification around the gray areas of compliance, which interested me because obviously most companies are dealing with compliance in one way or another. How would a company get involved in this kind of discussion?

O'Connor: First of all, in BPX, for instance, there's an area called Governance, Risk and Compliance, which covers a multitude of topics under those three broad headings. Under the CSR, (Corporate Social Responsibility), you've got areas covering sustainability; under the Chemicals Industry section of BPX, we've got links to Roundtables on areas of compliance that are related to manufacturing excellence, such as Perfect Plant pursuits, Energy Management; and, indeed, under the manufacturing community of BPX, you've got further compliance discussions that are ongoing there.

What I'm trying to do within the chemicals area of BPX is to just ensure that there is connection with all these areas so that, if a person is going into one area such as Energy Management or into Perfect Plant, they can orientate themselves, they can see that there is parallel discussion going on in related areas around the BPX community. I think that's very important because you can have people that are coming from seemingly very different backgrounds, very different industries and getting in there and, obviously, compliance is something that isn't just an issue with manufacturing industries: it's something that is the hot topic today and is on everyone's agenda, so we need to get as much broad discussion there as possible so that we can see the different perspectives. BPX allows us to do that because you've got a myriad of perspectives in a community that can be interlinked.