Katharina KöckS1SEVEN, BASF Performance Materials and Blum are reinventing how material data will be shared across supply chains for engineering plastics in the future - showcased at the K2022 Fair.
Certificates of Analysis prove conformity with specifications and compliance with normative references and accompany each batch of materials. They contain transaction notes, technical data on the product and the actual inspection results. In further processing, the information included in the Certificates of Analysis is a critical document for quality assurance.
Until now, BASF Performance Materials provided customers with Certificates of Analysis as PDF documents, which is an industry-standard practice. The information in Certificates of Analysis can’t be processed directly and requires human intervention, increasing errors and slowing the process. In practice, most customer efforts to extract the data by scanning and optical character recognition fail due to the variety of producer layouts and formats. For this reason, BASF, Blum and S1Seven started implementing Digital Certificates of Analysis.
“Digital Certificates of Analysis help us reduce cost and improve quality in processing certificates. The biggest potential in optimizing machine parameterization will improve the quality of our products,” says Ibrahim Othman, Quality Engineering Product Materials Plastics, Julius Blum. "We welcome BASF's decision to open source the format for broad adoption by the industry, an important step for us to realize Industry 4.0 fully."
BASF Performance Materials now provides industry customers with Digital Certificates of Analysis for engineering plastics.
“The Digital Certificate of Analysis is another way to establish digital channels in the plastics industry between us as raw material suppliers and our customers,” explains Dr. Andreas Wollny, Senior Manager Digitalization, BASF. “The benefit of this ecosystem approach is scalability and minimal implementation effort on the receiver end. Through the use of Open Source Standards, we expect a highly scalable solution and invite other raw material suppliers and customers to join the initiative. I believe this is key for addressing future challenges, such as increasing productivity to remain competitive and opening new opportunities for data sharing that help achieve targets like reducing emissions. The open format of the Digital Certificate of Analysis, combined with the features of the S1SEVEN platform, exactly meets the requirements of customers in the plastics industry.”
The data can quickly be processed through standardization at the customers' Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems or used in Manufacturing Executions Systems (MES) systems in injection molding machines. BASF Performance Materials supported S1Seven in developing the format and publishing the results as Open Source with a copyleft license, which is available at https://materialidentity.org. "At S1SEVEN, we strongly value our cooperation with BASF and the initiative to open source this data standard for the industry. The biggest compliment is enthusiastic feedback from the market on the solution," stated Stefan Grüll, CEO of S1Seven, a Vienna, Austria-based technology company.
About Julius Blum
Julius Blum GmbH is a family-owned company that operates worldwide, specializing in the manufacture and distribution of furniture fittings. Its main product groups are lift, hinge, pull-out and pocket systems for furniture. To make life easier for its customers and partners, Blum offers appropriate assembly devices and services to support marketing, purchasing, manufacturing and assembly processes. The company has eight plants in Vorarlberg, Austria, production sites in Poland, Brazil and the USA, and 33 subsidiaries and representative offices around the world. Blum supplies innovative fittings to customers in over 120 countries. The fittings manufacturer employs 9,400 people all over the world, 7,000 of whom are at its Head Office in Vorarlberg.
More information: www.blum.com
About S1SEVEN
S1Seven GmbH is a software platform provider that powers data traceability. S1SEVEN introduces digital material certificates to industrial supply chains. As a drop-in replacement for today's paper-based documents, for manufacturers, our software unlocks the value of traceable quality and sustainability data to create safer products and reach climate targets. The award-winning applications from S1SEVEN upscale existing enterprise software and enable the industry to share, process and verify material quality and sustainability certificates for steel, aluminum and engineering plastics across global supply chains. This is how automotive, engineering, construction and packaging companies are enabled to introduce data-driven processes and automate quality assurance and sustainability reporting.
More information: www.s1seven.com
Media contact: Katharina Köck
Email: katharina@s1seven.com
About BASF
At BASF, we create chemistry for a sustainable future. We combine economic success with environmental protection and social responsibility. Around 111,000 employees in the BASF Group contribute to the success of our customers in nearly all sectors and almost every country in the world. Our portfolio comprises six segments: Chemicals, Materials, Industrial Solutions, Surface Technologies, Nutrition & Care and Agricultural Solutions. BASF generated sales of €78.6 billion in 2021. BASF shares are traded on the stock exchange in Frankfurt (BAS) and as American Depositary Receipts (BASFY) in the U.S.
Further information at www.basf.com.