iPoint - Digital Circular Economy: Ensuring Compliance and Sustainability

Keeping up to date with the ever-changing regulatory landscape is an important competitive advantage that tackles the risk of non-compliance. But, as regulations are constantly growing in number and complexity, this is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to achieve. To ensure compliance throughout the product lifecycle, companies are struggling to collect, analyze, manage, and report compliance-relevant data across the entire supply chain and product development process. At the same time, businesses are compelled to bring transparency into their supply chains and comply with environmental and social standards to meet the demands of today’s consumers who are consuming more consciously. To help businesses tackle these challenges, iPoint offers end-to-end solutions for chemicals and components compliance, supply chain transparency, and product sustainability. Driven by the vision of securing a sustainable world for future generations, the company implements a Digital Circular Economy approach. This perspective creates a continuous digital system lifecycle management process that supports not only compliance with the law, but also the sustainability of products, value chains, and brands.



Accessing Compliance-Relevant Data across the Entire Supply Chain



At the center of iPoint's approach lies a holistic solutions portfolio designed for the entire lifecycle of products and systems—from design to production and use to recycling and reuse. With regard to products, this approach means that the information from all process steps must be taken into account in the design phase to return the products and their components to biological or technical cycles after the end of their useful life. iPoint's secure and reliable business process management solutions and its cloud platform for supply chain integration support companies in reducing the risk of compliance violations and advance sustainable product development. “Our solutions enable clients to comply with international and national standards, laws, and regulations while meeting sustainability goals through sustainable sourcing, closed-loop supply chains, and resource efficiency,” says Joerg Walden, CEO of iPoint.



By working hand in hand with clients, partners, international research institutes, and industry associations, and by consistently and systematically monitoring relevant compliance and sustainability standards, frameworks, and trends around the globe, the company offers solutions that are always one step ahead of the competition. The company covers product and supply chain compliance-relevant laws, including directives and regulations such as REACH, RoHS, ELV, California Proposition 65, or Conflict Minerals- and Modern Slavery-related laws. iPoint’s highly automated solutions help companies collect, analyze, manage, and report compliance-relevant data across the entire supply chain and life cycle of their products. Depending on the requirements, the client can customize iPoint’s solutions and functions for specific processes, products, or product groups.

With the company’s integrated, end-to-end solutions, clients can automate their entire compliance process from data entry and collection, data management and analysis, to reporting and auditing.“Our solutions enable clients to simplify complex tasks like data entry, validation, assessment, and replace tedious, time-consuming manual processes with automated processes,” notes Walden. Besides, iPoint’s solutions provide an automatic review of data concerning errors, reasonableness, reliability, and completeness. Clients can also benefit from automated tests within the solution that notify the supplier about corrective actions. Through automatization, iPoint’s solutions free up resources, reduce human errors, and simplify the process of gaining high-quality data in time. Similarly, iPoint’s support services help clients to gain maximum benefits from their investments and attain higher ROI. “Our project-accompanying support services make sure that the iPoint solutions fit perfectly into all kinds of environments and adapt to any future extension, from in-house to cloud, hybrid cloud, and beyond.”



To foster supply chain transparency, iPoint offers its comprehensive cloud-based solution suite, the iPointSustainHub, with multiple applications. The most widely used app, the iPoint Conflict Minerals Platform (iPCMP), is used by 50,000 companies around the globe. It helps them to request and deliver relevant information throughout the supply chain while protecting confidential information about business relationships and product composition. Individual companies can only view the requests they have sent to their direct customers or received from their direct suppliers. The identity of the rest of the supply chain remains hidden. “For our customers and us, it is always about transparency while at the same time protecting confidential information,” says Walden.



iPoint’s comprehensive, integrated solutions have proven beneficial for numerous firms especially multinational firms in parts-intensive and consumer-or customer-facing industries seeking a to move up the sustainability maturity curve and establish industry leadership. The effectiveness of iPoint’s solutions can be best explained by a customer success story. NIBE, a solution provider for indoor climate and comfort, is subject to international and national legislation in the area of environmental and social product compliance. iPoint assists NIBE in efficiently identifying hazardous materials and managing material approvals, thus supporting multinational companies in realising their vision to create world-class solutions in sustainable energy. iPoint's solution takes into account the stipulations laid down in the EU regulation REACH. iPoint facilitates efficient management of hazardous materials by automatically monitoring substances, mixtures, and articles while complying with all statutory provisions and amendments. “We support NIBE in developing compliant, sustainable products, thereby making an active contribution toward securing a sustainable future,” explains the CEO.

From Humble Beginnings to a Global Market Leader



Commencing its journey with specific chemical and component compliance solutions, iPoint has now provides a broad range of product sustainability and supply chain transparency solutions on a global scale. iPoint has grown substantially beyond its origins in automotive companies’ data exchange and BOM (Bill of Materials) analysis to not only deliver wide-ranging, cross-industry, compliance-oriented solutions, but also support companies' voluntary approaches to product sustainability via life cycle assessments (LCA), Design for the Environment (DfE), and supplier rating evaluations. Another example includes iPoint’s participation in MultiMaK, a project that is developing ecological assessment tools for the automotive sector. In 2017, iPoint was honoured as one of the most innovative small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany and thus included in this elite circle of innovators for the sixth time. In 2018, iPoint became one of the 13 companies selected in the European Commission’s Scale- Up Circular Business program. Since its inception, the company has constantly been expanding the iPoint Group and its portfolio to realize its vision of building an integrated digital platform for the Circular Economy. For example, in 2017, iPoint took over the ifu Institute of Environmental IT Hamburg, an industry leader in Life Cycle Assessment and Material Flow Cost Accounting. Recent additions include CircularTree, a Berlin- and Melbourne-based startup co-founded by iPoint that is aimed at leveraging blockchain technology to make the world a better, more sustainable place by supporting companies to achieve sustainable supply chains and products.



"Our project-accompanying support services make sure that the iPoint solutions fit perfectly into all kinds of environments and adapt to any future extension"



The solutions of the constantly growing iPoint Group are highly promising to numerous clients, including parts-intensive industries for comprehensive product design, compliance, manufacturing, supplier transparency, and end-of-life strategies. Consumer-facing and B2B industries will also seek iPoint’s help for guidance on moving up the sustainability maturity model. The company also satisfies the needs of large multinational firms for which data, systems, and stakeholder integrations require specialized support. Finally, iPoint will always remain a partner of choice for global market-leading companies to explore and develop new circular economy capabilities.



With a mission to be a pioneer of compliance solutions with extensiveknow-how to develop innovative and future-oriented software solutions, iPoint is looking at venturing into new technologies like blockchain, AI, and IoT. With respect to blockchain, the company is currently working on SustainBlock, a project that enables all parties involved— supplier, manufacturer, distributor, and end-consumer—to trace the provenance and history of a product and gain insight into the supply chain. Data recorded on a blockchain is not only instantly verifiable but also immutable. Each transaction is recorded and added to the previous one, resulting in a growing chain of information. This allows users to potentially inspect the entire, uninterrupted chain of custody from the raw materials to the sale of the finished product to end-users. “SustainBlock aims to increase the demand for minerals and metals that are responsibly sourced from conflict-affected and high-risk areas across the supply chain by enabling end-users to manage upstream due diligence processes,”concludes Walden.