Together, Tvilum-Scanbirk and RequirementOne have implemented a workflow driven solution to manage supplier compliance using the Web-based platform ReqMan™, ultimately ensuring good, safe products for consumers in compliance with market requirements.
The company: Tvilum-Scanbirk
The Tvilum-Scanbirk Group is Europe’s leading supplier of ready-to-assemble furniture. Tvilum-Scanbirk’s business concept is to design, manufacture and market high-quality, functional, board-based furniture at competitive prices.
They design furniture for every room of the home. The phrase "two a day" reflects that Tvilum-Scanbirk designs approximately 400 new models of furniture a year. Tvilum-Scanbirk manufactures over 16 million pieces of furniture a year, does well over 2 billion DKKs in sales per year (approximately $550M U.S.), and aims to be the world’s number one supplier of furniture to major retail customers.
Increased demand for managing compliance through supplier declarations
Today, production companies face an ever increasing growth in the number of requirements their products must comply with. The requirements include social responsibilities, such as no child labour, to environmental requirements like reduced CO2 emissions and detailed chemical requirements, such as formaldehyde concentrations, these requirements tax quality assurance and compliance staff to ensure that suppliers meet the standards. Tracking which suppliers must comply with which requirements is a highly complex task that gets more complicated every day.
“We are faced with an exponential growth of requirements coming from customers and internally driven by “our green wave” that demands full visibility from the cradle to the grave for all of our product components.”-- Finn Thomsen, Vice President of Quality and Environment, Tvilum-Scanbirk
The sheer volume of different products Tvilum-Scanbirk delivers to customers such as IKEA, Walmart, Staples, and Jysk creates an external flow of such requirements. In addition, Tvilum-Scanbirk is committed to pursuing the highest level of compliance for all of their products to international standards such as the Indoor Climate Label, the EU Eco-label and the sustainable forresting standards FSC and PEFC.
The Challenge
Tvilum-Scanbirk faces the daunting task of communicating this multitude of requirements to its suppliers, making sure each supplier understands the requirements, and acquiring supplier declarations from its suppliers stating that the requirements have actually been met on a daily basis.
“Traditionally, Tvilum-Scanbirk managed supplier declarations by using spreadsheets , PDFs and individual e-mail accounts, which made it almost impossible to keep up to date at all times with the declarations of hundreds of suppliers.”--Paul Lito, Quality and Product Safety Manager, Tvilum-Scanbirk
Requirements are often processed manually and traced manually throughout the system. Only through hard work and hyper-vigilance can Tvilum-Scanbirk employees track hundreds of requirements from conception, to agreement and buy in, to inclusion in supplier declarations. Multiple sources and lists of requirements are tracked in hundreds of disparate Excel worksheets. Ensuring that each requirement has been met is a laborious task involving manually tracking down different sources of information in different locations and, often, in different formats. In the case of suppliers that consist of merged companies or geographically dispersed sites, the tools to track requirements and supplier declarations can even reside on incompatible computer systems or applications, thereby further complicating the process.
And the stakes at risk are very high. Should a single requirement slip through the cracks, Tvilum-Scanbirk could be faced with extremely expensive public relation challenges, loss of goodwill and recalls of its products.
The Solution: ReqMan™ Supplier Declarations
ReqMan™ is a Web-based platform ensuring instant access to information from a Web browser on any computer. Information is stored in one central database on the ReqMan™ platform at a RequirementOne facility, thereby ensuring zero IT costs to the customer. Customers no longer need to incur the overhead and fallibility of constantly manipulating data in disparate locations or disparate applications manually.
Typical process for getting started with ReqMan™ Supplier Declarations
ReqMan™ Supplier Declarations are centralized, traceable, and customizable, ensuring a process with accountability and cohesiveness built-in. Customers start by identifying requirements and entering them into the system. Requirements can be revised at any point and can have attributes added to them such as “source”, “test required”, and so forth. At any time, customers can review every input to a requirement all the way back to that requirement’s inception.
Once requirements are entered into the ReqMan™ system, customers can automatically create documents based on selected requirements, including supplier declarations. Also, the digital documents created during this process can be easily transferred to workflows for follow-up and to ensure that procedures are adhered to each and every time. Task lists are easily generated from workflows so that each step in the supplier declaration process can be traced to who’s doing what and when. Moreover, all tasks and follow up are included in one easy overview and tasks and escalation procedures can be tied to specific steps and conditions in the workflow.
In addition, because the requirement to supplier declaration process is fully-accessible and customizable by everyone in the supplier/distributor relationship using nothing more than a Web browser and an Internet connection, priorities can be set interactively, vague or incomplete requirements can be clarified much more efficiently, and redundant requirements can be identified and eliminated quickly. Bottlenecks or gaps in the process can be examined and remedied by any and all participants.
“Because of ReqMan™, we now have a centralized repository that includes full traceability and provides a single, instant overview, workflow, and follow-up, that handles a larger volume of tasks, that grows with our needs, that provides faster response times, easier follow-up, and better service for our suppliers. The solution was developed as a traditional software project with releases and test cycles. We identified quite a few bugs throughout the process, and the RequirementOne team was quick to correct them or to provide workarounds until a permanent fix was in place.”-- Paul Lito, Quality and Safety Manager, Tvilum-Scanbirk
The Result: ReqMan™
By using ReqMan™ for its supplier declarations process, Tvilum-Scanbirk is able to more efficiently and more reliably track hundreds of requirements fulfilled by dozens of suppliers. No longer slowed by the manual process of tracking requirements, ReqMan™ allows Tvilum-Scanbirk to maintain up-to-date compliance status for each supplier, to access requirements that are current and immediately available at all times, and to fully trace all changes made to all requirements. Also, ReqMan™ is allowing Tvilum-Scanbirk to seamlessly add new requirements and suppliers on a continuous basis.
Because of the efficiency and elegance of the ReqMan™ solution, Tvilum-Scanbirk is poised to absorb the impact of future requirements on their production process, no matter how plentiful and diverse those requirements might be.
“I see the RequirementOne ReqMan™ platform as the future for managing requirements and supplier declarations, and it is a platform we can grow with. With the current ReqMan™ implementation, we have a very solid foundation and we are happy to partner with innovative companies like RequirementOne that are experts in requirement management and the development of cutting-edge web systems.”-- Paul Lito, Quality and Safety Manager, Tvilum-Scanbirk
For suppliers the ReqMan™ platform provides a single point of access to personalized sets of requirements set forth by their customers.
“Servicing our customers by complying with their requirements is a high priority for us. We were used to a cumbersome process in which it was difficult for us to identify the requirements that we had to comply with. Making the management of supplier declarations electronic and tailor made to our specific products has been a very innovative move by Tvilum-Scanbirk and, simply put, it is brilliant. I have all of my supplier declarations available at my finger tips, and it’s easy to communicate the relevant information to our engineers, if need be.”-- Steen Bille, Sales Manager, Furnitech, Sole Agent for Schatt-Decor in Scandinavia.
About Tvilum-Scanbirk
Tvilum-Scanbirk’s business concept is to design, manufacture and market high quality functional board based furniture, at competitive prices. The Tvilum-Scanbirk Group today is Europe’s leading supplier in its business area. The Group has eight production plants in Denmark, with a total floor space of 284,000 square meter and more than 1,650 employees. Tvilum-Scanbirk is part of the American Masco Corporation. For more information on Tvilum-Scanbirk, please visit their Web site at www.tvilum-scanbirk.com.
About Masco Corporation
Masco Corporation is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of home improvement and building products, as well as a leading provider of services that include the installation of insulation and other building products. For more information on Masco Corporation, please visit their website at www.masco.com.
About Schattdecor
Since its foundation in 1985, Schattdecor has undergone extremely dynamic growth, making it the global market leader in printed decor paper.  The Group, which operates production locations in Germany, Poland, Italy, Russia, China and Brazil, supplies printed decor paper to the derived timber products industry, where it is mainly used for the surface embellishment of residential and kitchen furniture and laminate flooring. For more information on Schattdecor, please visit their website at www.schattdecor.com.
About RequirementOne
RequirementOne is a community for professional teams of all sizes that develop, manage and communicate requirements with their stakeholders. At the core of the RequirementOne platform is the free ReqMan™ software solution, an on demand, web-based software suite that includes a variety of features that you can use to easily and effectively manage requirements and associated information within an organization and with external stakeholders. ReqMan™ covers Requirement Management, Requirement Gathering, Tender management & Request for Proposal, Sourcing & Request for Quotation and Supplier Declarations. For more information on RequirementOne, please visit their website at www.requirementone.com.