At the SAP Sustainability Innovation Days 2019, we shared the stage with Merck. This two-day event on November 5th and 6th brought us the latest news on S/4HANA for Product Compliance & EHS accompanied with several customer presentations. Read more
Word has it that there is a possible postponement of the January 2020 deadline for notification of consumer use products to the poison centers under the CLP Art. 45 regulation. We too have received hints of the shift from January 2020 to January 2021 from various stakeholders who attended the CARACAL meeting in July such as ECHA, as well as from some of our customers who are active in industry associations, and national poison centers.
How does this affect my company?
Participants at opesus CLP workshop
Our very first event was a huge success! Focused on the topic of CLP Article 45 Poison Centre Notifications for SAP customers and supported by the German Chemical Industry Association (VCI), we had a great turnout of 93 attendees – more than double of what we expected when we started planning a year ago.
ChemCon Europe 2018 will happen from November 12th to 16th in Budapest. One of the seminars will focus on Poison Centre Notifications according to CLP Art. 45. The seminar features several speakers, among them from ECHA (Mercedes Viñas, Daniel Sompolski), BASF and the Dutch Poison Information Centre. Alexander Wegener from opesus gives a lecture on “How to track portfolio changes or raw material changes in relation to updating of your poison centre notification?”.
If you are visiting ChemCon, we would be happy to talk to you at our booth. We are looking forward to learn new things, meet people and to have interesting discussions there!
On 22nd and 23rd of October 2018 the CLP conference of the Chem-Academy will take place. One of the main topics there will be “Art. 45 of the CLP Regulation: regulatory requirements and technical implementation “. Alexander Wegener from opesus gives a lecture on “Technical Implementation of Art. 45 CLP-VO”.
The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has published the technical format for reports to poison centres (according to CLP Article 45)! The new PCN-Format is based on the internationally harmonised IUCLID format. This article explores the effects the new format will have on industry.
Contrary to the preliminary draft, the new PCN-Format is now based on the IUCLID format. The IUCLID software allows data on chemical properties to be maintained, stored and exchanged. The internationally harmonised IUCLID format is used for this purpose. This format will now also be used for notifications to poison centres in accordance with CLP Article 45.
The IUCLID format consists of a variety of templates for documents, which are structured according to the type of information it contains (e.g. GHS data).
For the PCN format, 15 existing documents are reused. In addition, two new templates are added to the IUCLID format: “Product Information” and “Dossier Header”, which provides notification type details (e.g. update). All completed documents are combined into a dossier, which associates the contained documents through administrative data. The completed dossier will subsequently be sent to the national authorities. The dossier can then be used by national poison centres for emergency calls.
At opesus, we work in close cooperation with industry, ECHA and SAP to assist companies with their CLP Article 45. We are currently developing a new version of our software opesus EHS Product Notification, which supports the new PCN-Format. Based on our experience, we see the following effects of the new format:
A dossier consists of many documents that are linked by administrative data. The new PCN-Format is therefore very complex and much more comprehensive compared to previous formats.
For example, a very simple notification (a few substances with no “special” types) generates about 1,500 lines of XML code in PCN-Format. In comparison, the notification of the same mixture in the previous German (BfR) format consists of about 150 lines of XML code.
One way to create IUCLID-compatible dossiers is to use the IUCLID software. The software is available for free. However, the data must be maintained manually via the input mask of the software. For this reason, in our opinion the use of IUCLID software is advisable only for smaller companies with very limited mixtures subject to notification.
Note: In the past, SAP EH&S had an IUCLID interface. However, the interface currently only supports the older IUCLID 5.4 version and will be discontinued in SAP S/4HANA. From our point of view therefore, the IUCLID interface in SAP EH&S is not a viable solution.
The IUCLID format is subject to annual updates. These updates can be prompted by changes in legislation or to the PCN-format. Also, changes that do not originate from CLP Art. 45 need to be evaluated and may cause adaptions to PCN notifications. For all solutions that creates notifications in PCN-Format, availability of software maintenance is therefore essential to be able to react to changes in time and reliably. We recommend maintenance for all our customers for our opesus EHS Product Notification software.
We have released a new version of the opesus UFI Generator for SAP EHSM customers. With the new version, Unique Form Identifiers (UFI) can be generated and stored automatically in SAP EHSM.
