WestWood Kunsttofftechnik GmbH is a rapidly growing, family-owned company specializing in liquid waterproofing systems for the construction industry. Its solutions protect everything from roofs and car parks to oil rigs, railway platforms, and bridges across 16 countries in Europe and North America.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: out-of-the-box enterprise management
With six locations and a rapidly expanding international presence, WestWood faced growing complexity in managing siloed data and keeping up with ever-evolving compliance requirements. The company’s small product safety team was stretched thin, struggling to maintain manual processes and ensure the highest standards across teams and departments. To better serve customers and streamline its operations, WestWood set out to find an integrated, automated solution.
To address these challenges, the German construction company adopted a comprehensive suite of cloud solutions, services, and learning resources to accelerate its digital transformation.
Working together with SAP gold partner Innovabee, WestWood implemented SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP S/4HANA for product compliance. WestWood unified business processes, standardized information management, and automated workflows across the company. This integrated approach made critical data accessible to all relevant teams, helping WestWood stay ahead of compliance regulations and support sustainable growth.
Automating product safety for innovation and growth
“We wanted a solution that automated important steps of our product safety processes and was flexible, so we can evolve our workflows as compliance standards change and our company expands into new markets and regions with dynamic requirements,” explained Martin Wegner, product safety manager at WestWood.
The flexibility of WestWood’s products has spurred innovation, such as the growing trend of green roofs, which require robust waterproofing. “It’s becoming increasingly popular to grow plants on roofs, creating a ‘green roof’ that is environmentally friendly and improves air quality,” Wegner added. “New construction trends such as this encourage us to continuously innovate.”
Given that many of WestWood’s protective, decorative, and slip-resistant finishes require special handling, product safety and compliance are mission-critical. Previously, these processes were manually and fragmented across departments, making it difficult for the small team to keep up with changing regulations.
Harnessing automation for superior customer service
With SAP S/4HANA for product compliance, WestWood automated the delivery of product safety information. Now, every customer automatically receives up-to-date safety data sheets with their orders, and these updates can be sent instantly to all previous customers, ensuring safe and compliant use of WestWood products. Previously, this was a time-consuming manual process. Thanks to the automated customer service process, now over 24,000 e-mails are sent automatically each year, saving time and ensuring compliance.
“Automating this process is an amazing time-saver,” Wegner noted. “It makes our lives so much easier and helps us ensure the latest safety and usage instructions are reliably available to our customers.” Centralized data management also provides a continuously updated, auditable track record of all product safety activities.
Automation has also improved internal processes. The product safety team now receives automated notifications whenever product safety information is needed and can easily support multiple languages and fulfill local compliance requirements and regulations.
According to Wegner, “As we expand into new markets, the built-in internationalization features of SAP S/4HANA will be crucial to our success and help us deliver outstanding customer service and support sustainable processes in compliance with local regulations.” This enables WestWood to have faster, more practical management of customer orders for around 10 users across 3 departments, supporting the innovative company’s global expansion.
“Thanks to SAP S/4HANA for product compliance, it is impossible to forget things,” Wegner said. “No information gets delayed in communication between departments, and customers instantly receive the latest safety and usage information for our products.”
Streamlining workflows and supporting sustainability
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, and support from Innovabee, WestWood no longer needs to run on-premises IT systems and can focus on adding value for its customers.
Building on the success of its SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition implementation, WestWood plans to further streamline its operations. The ambitious company aims to consolidate two systems for dangerous goods management into a single SAP application. They are also planning to fully automate label printing, which is an important step as new regulations require larger font sizes and more detailed information. Automatic label printing based on existing product data will optimize management, eliminate redundancies, and save significant time and effort.
WestWood is also committed to sustainability. By reducing paper use and leveraging integrated solutions from SAP, the company is expanding its sustainability management and reporting capabilities. Streamlining and automating compliance with documentation and labeling guidelines, as well as managing hazardous chemicals, allows WestWood to protect the environment at every stage — from production plants and warehouses to end customers.
Improved insights and reporting are also helping WestWood future-proof its business and stay competitive in an industry shifting toward greater environmental, social, and governance transparency.
To learn more, read WestWood’s customer story: Elevating product compliance processes through automation.
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