WestWood Kunststofftechnik: Elevating product compliance processes through automation
Streamlining product compliance processes with SAP
Fast and smooth customer service combined with high-quality products are WestWood® Kunststofftechnik GmbH’s competitive advantages. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition with an integrated product compliance solution enables WestWood to automate product safety workflows and helps support international business growth.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Manufacturer of Liquid Resins | Petershagen, Germany | 160 employees | Innovabee |
saved compared to manual product safety workflows
automated product safety information emails sent every year
international expansion with automated workflows
Product Safety Manager, WestWood® Kunststofftechnik GmbH
Simplifying and automating product safety processes
WestWood® Kunststofftechnik GmbH is a fast-growing, family-owned business that produces liquid waterproofing systems for the construction industry. Its cutting-edge systems can accommodate a variety of projects from roofs, car parks, and stairways through to oil rigs, railway platforms, and bridges. With six locations delivering to 16 countries across Europe and North America, WestWood is growing rapidly and always looking to expand into new areas of the market and new geographies.
A specialist in waterproofing and coating systems based on liquid resins, WestWood prides itself on the rapid curing times of its products. Paired with exceptional customer service and same-day delivery, the company helps its customers complete their construction projects faster, more safely, and more effectively compared to traditional waterproofing systems.
The versatile nature of WestWood’s products encourages innovation. For example, more and more customers have been using WestWood systems to build green roofs in recent years. “It’s becoming increasingly popular to grow plants on roofs, creating a ‘green roof’ that is environmentally friendly and improves air quality,” explains Martin Wegner, Product Safety Manager at WestWood® Kunststofftechnik. “A green roof relies on a robust waterproofing layer to protect the building below. New construction trends such as this encourage us to continuously innovate.”
Many of WestWood’s protective, decorative, and slip-resistant finishes need to be handled with special care. Effective product safety and compliance is therefore front-and-center for the company. In the past, product safety processes at WestWood were manual and siloed across different departments. But with compliance requirements constantly evolving, WestWood’s small product safety team struggled to keep pace. This prompted a search for an integrated solution that could help automate key aspects across teams and departments.
Product Safety Manager, WestWood® Kunststofftechnik GmbH
Deploying a tailored product safety solution in the cloud
To streamline its business operations, WestWood selected a complete offering of solutions, services, community, and learning to accelerate cloud ERP adoption. With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition enterprise management solution alongside the SAP S/4HANA for product compliance solution, WestWood implemented an integrated application that covers all aspects of the business, making information available across the company and automating workflows.
Operating in various countries, WestWood needs to support its core business processes in different languages and facilitate compliance with constantly evolving regional regulations to ensure safe and sustainable use of its products everywhere. “When we evaluated different business applications on the market, we realized that with SAP, we could easily support multiple languages and fulfill local compliance requirements and regulations,” recalls Martin Wegner. “As we expand into new markets, the built-in internationalization features of SAP S/4HANA will be crucial to our success and help us deliver outstanding customer service and support sustainable processes in compliance with local regulations.”
Working together with SAP Gold Partner Innovabee, WestWood completed the implementation quickly and smoothly. With Innovabee’s SAP and industry expertise, WestWood was able to tailor the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition solutions to its specific business needs. For example, WestWood and Innovabee co-developed a pragmatic solution that combines two logistics documents into a single receipt, reducing printing costs and complexity for external delivery drivers.
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, WestWood standardized information management and formalized processes across the business, streamlining access to critical data for the product safety team.
Product Safety Manager, WestWood® Kunststofftechnik GmbH
Harnessing automation for product safety and customer service
With the SAP S/4HANA for product compliance solution, WestWood successfully automated workflows and improved the visibility of critical information to stay ahead of compliance regulations and ensure superior customer service.
A key benefit for the product safety team is the automation of delivering product safety information to customers. With every purchase, customers receive a safety data sheet – and any updates can now easily be sent to every past customer to ensure safe use of WestWood’s products. In the past, sending out product safety information was a laborious manual process, as team members had to search through folders and documents. Now, all product information is automatically emailed out when the order is delivered, with over 24,000 emails going out to customers annually.
“Automating this customer service process is an amazing time saver,” says Martin Wegner. “It makes our lives so much easier and helps us to ensure the latest safety and usage instructions are reliably available to our customers.” And because the data is centrally managed with the SAP solution, WestWood benefits from a continuously updated, auditable track record of product safety processes.
Cutting delays and boosting productivity, the product safety team now gets automated internal notifications whenever product safety information is required in a new language after a sale in a new market. This enables faster and more proactive management of customer orders for around 10 users across three departments, supporting WestWood’s international growth.
Product Safety Manager, WestWood® Kunststofftechnik GmbH
Streamlining critical workflows and increasing transparency
Building on the successes of its SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition implementation, WestWood is planning to continue its journey with SAP and Innovabee to unlock further savings and improvements. For example, the company wants to consolidate two systems for dangerous goods management in a single SAP application.
As its cloud ERP solution evolves, WestWood is also planning to fully automate label printing for its products. In a dynamic environment where new regulations will require larger font sizes for certain information, for example, transforming label printing based on already available product information would optimize data management, eliminate redundancies, and save WestWood a lot of time and effort.
With WestWood already improving its sustainability by reducing the use of paper, the company aims to leverage the integrated SAP solution to expand its sustainability management and reporting. By streamlining and automating compliance with documentation and labeling guidelines and other aspects of complex dangerous goods processes, the company can support the handling of regulated substances such as hazardous chemicals more effectively. A comprehensive, holistic, and integrated approach to product compliance helps WestWood to protect the environment at every stage of the business, from its plants and warehouses to the customers using its products.
Furthermore, improved insights and reporting are crucial for WestWood to future-proof its business to keep up with larger competitors at a time when the industry shifts to more environmental, social, and governance (ESG) transparency.
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Featured partner
Innovabee is a SAP Gold Partner specializing in SAP S/4HANA implementations for mid-sized businesses, with its four offices in Germany and Austria. An early adopter with an agile mindset, Innovabee has achieved six SAP Quality Awards for Customer Success as well as SAP Recognized Expertise for Chemicals Industry. Innovabee delivers cost-effective implementations through the GROW with SAP offering.