The list of regulatory requirements for manufacturing companies is constantly growing. For procurement, this means an increasing documentation burden, as a lack of comprehensive material data risks sales bans, fines of up to 100,000 euros, and the loss of strategic customers. At the same time, a proactive approach to material compliance offers the opportunity to respond to customer inquiries faster and differentiate yourself from the competition.

Lisa Stahl (Procurement Excellence Team at Fischer) and Simon Vötter (Customer Development at Tacto) show in this webinar how Fischer is transitioning from reactive to proactive material compliance, systematically tracking over 20,000 components across more than 3,000 suppliers.

Regulatory requirements at a glance

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From REACH and RoHS to PFAS and the new EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), manufacturing companies across all sectors are facing growing regulatory pressure. Under REACH alone, SVHC substances in articles exceeding 0.1 percent by weight must be disclosed and reported throughout the entire supply chain. For RoHS, maximum substance limits for lead, cadmium, and mercury apply to every component, and a declaration of conformity is mandatory. For suppliers to OEMs, a missing declaration of conformity can lead to being delisted.

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Fischer's compliance challenge

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Fischer is a world-leading manufacturer of fastening systems and assembly solutions with around 4,800 employees. The Procurement Excellence Team led by Lisa Stahl is responsible for material compliance for more than 20,000 components from over 3,000 suppliers. The particular challenge: compliance information must be captured not just at the article level, but based on the specific combination of supplier and material, as an article can have different substance compositions depending on the source.

Before implementing Tacto, Fischer’s process was reactive: whenever a customer inquiry regarding REACH or RoHS arrived, the procurement team would manually send out supplier requests via email, consolidate data sheets individually, and answer the inquiry on a case-by-case basis. This resulted in fragmented Excel spreadsheets on shared drives, data silos between procurement, quality, and engineering, and time-consuming email ping-pong without tracking or automated reminders.

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From reactive to proactive compliance management

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The decisive step for Fischer was the shift from a reactive to a proactive approach. Instead of restarting the same manual process for every customer inquiry, Fischer is using Tacto to build a central, structured compliance database. Every source—the unique combination of supplier and article—is assigned its own compliance status, which can be filtered by SVHC status, exemptions, CAS numbers, and expiration dates.

Tacto automates supplier inquiries: pre-built templates are sent to suppliers, who enter their responses directly into a structured format. The feedback flows automatically into the database, eliminating the need for procurement staff to manually extract data from individual PDFs. Over time, this creates a complete compliance dataset that allows customer inquiries to be answered in hours rather than weeks.

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Conclusion

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The Fischer case study demonstrates that material compliance in procurement is not a one-time project, but an ongoing process that is difficult to scale without a central data foundation and automation. Those who make the shift from reactive documentation to proactive compliance management not only reduce risks and workload but also create a genuine competitive advantage for customer inquiries and OEM audits.

Lisa Stahl (Procurement Excellence Team, Fischer) and Simon Vötter (Customer Development, Tacto) show how Fischer is managing the transition from reactive to proactive material compliance for over 20,000 components and more than 3,000 suppliers. In this webinar, they provide an overview of the most important regulations from REACH to PPWR, explain Fischer's path to a central compliance dataset at the source level, and provide a live demonstration of the Tacto Material Compliance module.

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