90% Time Savings Through Automated REACH Regulation Compliance

Anton Debatin GmbH

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🏗 Industry: Packaging Solutions

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🗺 Headquarters: Bruchsal, Germany

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🧍 Employees: ~ 220

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💲 Revenue ~ $55M per year

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💲 Procurement Volume ~ $36M per year

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For over 100 years, Anton Debatin GmbH has established itself as a leading provider of secure packaging solutions. As a manufacturer of logistics and film packaging, environmental protection is Anton Debatin's top priority. For the past two years, the company has voluntarily published a comprehensive sustainability report and was the first company to receive the Sustainability Champion Award. The product portfolio spans a wide range of laboratory-safe, tamper-proof, and shipping-safe solutions, including mailing envelopes, document pouches, and resealable bags. Anton Debatin is currently expanding into the medical market as a new product segment.

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"By using Tacto, you can check at the click of a button whether certain substance groups are present on a supplier and item basis. The automated REACH query through Tacto makes it possible to retrieve REACH data from all suppliers at the push of a button and conduct detailed queries at the item level." - Veronika Stricker, Quality Management Team Lead, Anton Debatin

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Initial Situation

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The REACH regulation covers the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals.

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The REACH regulation differentiates between manufacturers, processors, and importers. Anton Debatin acts as a downstream user through the use of its own products and the placing of articles on the market. Debatin's role is to gather information, evaluate it, and pass it along.

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For Anton Debatin's products that contain hazardous substances, there is an obligation to disclose. This disclosure must include information about how much of the hazardous substance is contained and what potential effects it may have. Suppliers, in turn, are required to provide information about the effects, thresholds, and other relevant aspects.

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Anton Debatin is required to continuously assess whether it will be possible in the future to replace the hazardous substances contained in its products. As long as a replacement is not feasible, the obligation to pass on information remains. This information sharing includes detailed data about the substances contained in each product, at a very granular level — from individual items down to the materials used, such as film, paper, and adhesive.

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The Challenge

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The REACH regulation is based on a Candidate List of Substances of Very High Concern (SVHC), which currently includes 235 substances. The SVHC list is updated on average every six months by adding new substances. When the SVHC list is expanded, there is an obligation to provide updated information to the end consumer within 45 days of publication.

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In this context, after each update of the substance list, all 60 of Anton Debatin's suppliers must be contacted individually on a semi-annual basis. Each supplier received a separate email with the corresponding contacts. Each of these emails had to be individually drafted, created, and sent. The challenge was that contacts frequently change, and updates were not always tracked in the system, leading to outdated master data.

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When suppliers responded, they didn't just send individual answers but also acknowledgments of receipt or other inquiries. The problem was compounded by the use of a non-Outlook/Microsoft-based platform, making it difficult to consolidate these responses and assign them to the respective suppliers. This resulted in significant manual effort.

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All email responses were compiled and tracked in an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was laboriously created and included information on all 60 suppliers, broken down by contact person, supplier type, and product category. This approach proved time-consuming due to its complexity.

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Due to the resulting capacity constraints, Anton Debatin decided to automate the handling of the REACH regulation and other manually intensive processes in supplier management using a dedicated tool.

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3 Needs Debatin Wanted to Address

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Increase process efficiency in implementing the REACH regulation

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Automated integration of REACH information from suppliers into supplier evaluation and action management

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Filtered overview at the click of a button and data transparency across all REACH information as well as supplier information for additional compliance requirements

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‍Tacto as THE Solution

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Anton Debatin chose Tacto as its software solution because Tacto is specifically tailored to the needs of mid-size companies and, in addition to automating REACH, covers all essential supplier processes in an automated fashion.

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"By using Tacto, you can check at the click of a button whether certain substance groups are present on a supplier and item basis. The automated REACH query through Tacto makes it possible to retrieve REACH data (SVHC substances) from all suppliers at the push of a button and conduct detailed queries at the item level (SCIP numbers)."

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Even with increasing query frequency or a growing supplier base, Anton Debatin experiences no additional effort thanks to the Tacto tool. By using Tacto, 90% of the time is saved per REACH query and a total of 10 working days per year are saved across the entire REACH query volume.

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Additional compliance topics such as RoHS and POP as well as certifications like ISO 9001 and sustainability certifications are also automatically queried from suppliers through the supplier self-assessment. This information is collected and evaluated once a year. Here too, Tacto delivers massive time savings.

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An additional integrative step is the inclusion of REACH and other compliance data as an evaluation variable in the supplier assessment. Suppliers are automatically rated on topics such as sustainability, development potential, and innovation based on, for example, their REACH, RoHS, and POP data. This enables a comprehensive supplier evaluation and prioritization of suppliers.

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Especially in light of the discussed tightening of the REACH regulation toward PFAS, Tacto enables the identification of PFAS suppliers and PFAS items at the click of a button and can proactively implement measures through the tool — such as supporting the supplier in finding alternative materials to PFAS — to mitigate risk. Additionally, Tacto supports the onboarding process for new suppliers and can initially query and integrate REACH information.

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3 Wins with Tacto:

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90% time savings through automation of all REACH-related processes

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Savings of 10 working days per year through automation of REACH queries

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Building a strategic supplier management system focused on developing the supplier base

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Looking Ahead with Tacto

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What Anton Debatin particularly values is the co-innovation approach in working with Tacto.

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"We are involved in many development projects and it's incredibly exciting to see how the solution continuously evolves. I have rarely seen or heard of a software tool that works this closely with the customer and their actual needs."

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Thank you to Veronika Stricker and the entire Anton Debatin team for our trusted partnership and collaboration.

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Through partners and customers like you, it is possible to continuously improve our product through close collaboration and hands-on engagement, as well as to discuss the topics that matter most to industrial procurement teams in joint webinars.

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Discover how Anton Debatin achieved 90% time savings through automated REACH regulation compliance with Tacto.