How Henkel Automated C&L Inventory Notifications to ECHA with opesus

At Henkel, Classification and Labeling (C&L) notifications for all EU businesses are coordinated centrally from the company’s headquarters. Given the large volume of adhesive technologies and consumer-brand products, thousands of notifications must be kept continuously up to date. Not to mention, every newly manufactured or imported substance must be identified and reported to ECHA.

Until recently, this work was largely manual. Dossiers were created in IUCLID using data from SAP^® Product Compliance and then uploaded individually to the ECHA submission portal. As Henkel’s substance portfolio kept growing, so did the monthly workload. The Product Safety and Regulatory Affairs team was dedicating significant time to manual, repetitive tasks, offering an opportunity to streamline processes and enable greater focus on higher-value compliance work.

One Automated Process, End-to-End to ECHA

To eliminate the manual bottleneck, Henkel implemented the opesus solution for C&L Inventory. The software turns the management of C&L notifications into an automated, standardized workflow. With a single click, it generates dossiers directly from SAP Product Compliance data and can also automatically submit them to ECHA via a secure system-to-system (S2S) data transfer. This removes the need to touch the ECHA submission portal for routine submissions.

The result is a process that runs on its own. Managing notifications to the C&L Inventory is standardized, reducing errors and freeing experts for other compliance activities. Dossier quality is more consistent, turnaround times are shorter, and expert attention is reserved for the exceptions that need it.

We were able to integrate existing technical solutions for the identification of relevant substances with the opesus solution into a fully automated process. This included finding solutions for some Henkel-specific, non-standard challenges. We appreciated how quickly the opesus team responded throughout the implementation process. Dr. Ole Schrader Senior Manager Regulatory Affairs

Why opesus?

When evaluating options, Henkel looked for a solution that was both technically sound and easy to adopt within its existing landscape. opesus met both tests:

A familiar, proven approach.
The opesus solution, especially for process automation and S2S data transfer, is already known and trusted at Henkel. This is evidenced by the successful roll-out of opesus solutions for the EU Poison Center Notification and Swiss Chemical Product Register (BAG) notification.
An onboarded, standard solution.
As an established partner with a mature product offering, opesus was a natural fit, given its proven technology and existing relationship with Henkel.

Compliance, Turned into a Competitive Advantage

What began as a project to reduce manual effort delivered something bigger: a sustainable and scalable solution that boosts the capacity of Henkel’s Product Safety and Regulatory Affairs experts. Repetitive monthly tasks have been replaced by a fully automated end-to-end process. The team at Henkel is now free to focus on high-value regulatory and compliance work that only they can do.

The opesus team worked closely with Henkel to integrate existing technical solutions and accommodate Henkel-specific non-standard requirements, especially for the “group implementation,” allowing for the notification of multiple specifications of the same chemistry, given Henkel's huge raw materials portfolio.

Together, the solution and its implementation demonstrated what opesus brings to its customers: standard software that can be flexibly adapted to real-world complexity, a proven automation model that scales, and a partnership approach for strategically managing regulatory compliance.

Freeing Expert Capacity: Automating C&L Notifications at Scale