Customers Case Studies

Background

GrafTech International is a world leader in graphite material science with more than 120 years of experience in the graphite and carbon industry. GrafTech's products are used in a variety of applications in a diverse array of industries, including the production of steel and non-ferrous metals, electronics, fuel cell power generation, solar energy, aerospace and transportation, among others.

GrafTech's products include graphite electrodes, advanced carbon and graphite materials, and natural graphite. Continuing a century-old tradition of global leadership, the employees of GrafTech are united in their dedication to common goals: continually improving productivity, maximizing profitability and delivering the highest levels of quality and value to its customers.

Challenges

GrafTech is truly a global company, with its products manufactured on four continents and sold in about 80 countries around the world. Each of its products requires at least one, if not several, Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS). With its product line constantly expanding, GrafTech's EH&S team found it challenging to keep up with authoring the MSDSs that each new product required.

Effective, compliant and up-to-date documents— especially MSDSs— are not only a global requirement, but serve as the critical centerpiece for enabling effective product stewardship practices throughout the product's lifecycle. In today's environment, merely producing an MSDS is not enough. Quality, accuracy and currency are critical components to fulfilling the original intentions for requiring documentation in the first place.

"We have a wide array of products," explained said Dave Mieskowski, Senior Manager, Corporate Product Responsibility, GrafTech. "Each MSDS needs to be ‘globalized' to comply in the various markets where we sell our products. This can result in as many as 10 MSDSs for a given product."

With the sheer volume of required MSDSs increasing and both international and local EH&S regulations constantly changing, the EH&S team started to feel the impact.

"We needed to globalize our MSDS authoring strategy and it is a challenge to keep up with regulatory changes around the world," said Mr. Mieskowski. "We sell our products in multiple countries, and each country has its own unique set of requirements in terms of MSDS authoring. Researching these requirements and then authoring compliant documents was extremely time intensive and cumbersome, so we opted to outsource the authoring portion of our MSDS management program."

Solution

Mr. Mieskowski began researching authoring solutions, including 3E Company's Ariel MSDS Authoring Service. "We needed an Authoring expert that could help us navigate international regulatory initiatives and help us efficiently and effectively produce and maintain MSDSs that comply with these initiatives," said Mr. Mieskowski.

He ultimately selected 3E Company's service because of the global scope of its service offering. 3E's own multi-lingual staff of dedicated, highly qualified authors, create, analyze and manage globally compliant MSDSs and product label content covering regulatory and language requirements for more than 50 countries. Authors can format MSDSs to be compliant with ANSI, GHS, and all of the major global requirements such as Japan, EU, USA and Canada, producing compliant documents that meet the needs of GrafTech's most complex requirements.

"We now rely on 3E Company to author most of our international MSDSs, including those in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, China, France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway and Sweden," said Mr. Mieskowski.

GrafTech's MSDSs are created and kept up-to-date by leveraging Ariel aggregated regulatory data. The breadth of countries covered and depth of regulatory information provided by this data offers unprecedented support for identifying, monitoring and complying with ever changing EH&S requirements.

Results

Outsourcing MSDS authoring to 3E Company has allowed Mr. Mieskowski and the rest of the EH&S team to focus on the more strategic aspects of product responsibility. The team has also noticed increased productivity as they are able to delegate the time-intensive and cumbersome regulatory tracking and MSDS authoring tasks to the Ariel team.

"We are continually impressed by the scope of the 3E's Ariel Authoring service," said Mr. Mieskowski. "Our Ariel authoring team has an unparalleled combination of regulatory knowledge and real world expertise. We have not found another service that can rival the depth of 3E's knowledge in this area."

Location:  Parma, OH
3E Services: Ariel MSDS Authoring Services
Industry/Market: Manufacturer of graphite electrodes, advanced carbon and graphite materials and natural graphite
Company Web Site:  http://www.graftech.com