In this blog post, we explore how a major consumer goods company used TopQuadrant’s TopBraid Live server to provide a Raw MaterialAssessment for pre-Market, Market, and in-Market Compliance.
Background
A major consumer goods company found it difficult to determine which of their numerous products could be sold in which markets.
Challenge
The company’s products have complex compositions with many ingredients where each individual ingredient may or may not be approved for sale in a certain market. Often market-specific regulations are contextual – dependent on various conditions. For example, an ingredient may be approved in a context of one type of usage and not approved in a context of another type of usage. This means that the solution needed to be flexible and powerful enough to capture regulatory requirements in full context.
Solution
TopQuadrant created semantic models describing materials using a material breakdown. A material breakdown defines the composition of material in a structured manner so that each material can be decomposed to a molecular level. This breakdown enabled regulatory assessments. For all materials, the solution included models and web services to capture Environmental, Human Safety and Regulatory assessments. In cases of assembled materials their overall conclusions and contingencies were also covered. Models that drove the solution described information about materials and molecules in the “context” of where that information was valid, enabling integrations and aggregations across geographical and domain boundaries. This included product details, materials and their constituents as well as support for substitute information and polymeric materials. Key components of the solution were taxonomies with all basic reference data of the organization and services to keep them up-to-date. Given as input a product and a target market, solution was then able to determine if a product could be sold in the market and, if not, identify reasons.
Organization had several applications and front-ends that were using lighter, less comprehensive data models – yet they either needed the results of the full material assessment or they collected and provided information that was necessary for the material assessment. To support such integrations, solution included services that delivered or received information in a simplified form according to the needs of the integration points, even though the underlying data were always stored and described using the full comprehensive model.
Figure 1: Faceted search in the Asset Viewer application
Results
Solution automatically transformed information from the richer data model to present a simplified view. In this solution, data, constraints and even error messages were all described as part of the data model.
The ease of use and flexibility of TopBraid compliance solutions allows users to easily adapt the solution for compliance policies and procedures in response to changes in the legal and regulatory landscape.