UL Transforms Customer Relationships with Real-Time Collaboration - Case Study

Underwriters Laboratories (UL) is a household name in product safety throughout the world. Each year, more than 20 billion UL marks appear on products from 72,000 manufacturers in 98 countries.

UL has been certifying product safety and assessing compliance for more than 115 years. But as manufacturers’ operations have grown global, the certification industry has changed as well.

“UL has a rich history and commitment to public safety and bringing safer products to market faster, but as our world and its safety needs have evolved, so has UL,” says Christian Anschuetz, senior vice president and CIO of Chicago-based UL, which employs 7,000 people at 64 facilities worldwide. “Not only have we continued to grow and expand, but so have our customers. We live in a global marketplace, so we need to be everywhere our customers need us.”

Product testing and certification is a knowledge business, and UL considers the unsurpassed expertise of its engineers, technicians and scientists a core asset. The company has been vigorously expanding its capabilities, expertise and overall scope of service offerings through acquisitions and partnerships.

Such expansive growth has left the company with a varied mixture of inefficient and aging technologies as well as disjointed business processes.

Now, working with HP Services, UL is in the process of a multi-year transformation to standardize its processes and technologies and unleash the talents and productivity of each employee.