task management. In the next few sections, we look at each in a little more
detail.
Customer compliance management ................................................
Your solution should enable you to respond to customer compliance requests
quickly and accurately. It should also allow you to record all replies to cus-
tomer queries about any given product and automatically tell you which
customers require new documents in the event of changes or new environ-
mental conditions. Such functionality will lower your costs across the board,
especially if you’re making large quantities of product in conjunction with
multiple global suppliers.
Supplier compliance management ...................................................
It is as important to exchange product data with suppliers as it is to do so
with customers. Your solution to supplier compliance management should
include a current, accurate database and be able to automatically request
missing data about contents, substances, or compositions that you can
receive from suppliers in standard formats. After you have the data, you’ll
need to document it for subsequent inspection. If details or regulations rele-
vant to your product change, you should be able to send a request to your
suppliers for updates.
Compliance reporting ........................................................................
Yet another functionality you need is the ability to generate and distribute
reports that meet the requirements of all parties in the compliance chain —
from regulatory authorities and product developers to environmental officers
and customers. You also want to track both the creation date of particular
reports and the recipients, so that you can generate and sending new reports
in the event of detected changes. With strong document and data manage-
ment capabilities, duplications will be a thing of the past, and you’ll be able
to circumvent the difficulties of conflicting data formats, multiple languages,
and change management.
Comprehensive task management ...................................................
Suppliers, customers, regulatory authorities, internal departments, factories,
sites, and overseas subsidiaries — these are all participants in the compli-
ance process, and you must be able to cooperate with each of them together
226 Part III: Going Green
