Case Study: Ergon achieves scalable safety and transparency

That same standardization helped Ergon absorb its own growth.

“As Ergon has grown, each acquired business comes with its own system, its own process, its own documentation practices,” Snow said.

“Having standardized tools and trusted regulatory data
helps us integrate new businesses much more efficiently,
while we're able to maintain consistent compliance
for our existing facilities.”

Transparency expanded further downstream with 3E's supply chain and product compliance platform, 3E Exchange.

“There is a definite shift toward supply chain transparency in industry,” Snow said, “and customers request a lot more detailed regulatory, sustainability, and ingredient information.”

Ergon uses 3E Exchange to streamline how that information moves between its suppliers, its own businesses, and its customers, reducing duplicate requests and the rework that comes with them, while improving the quality of the data being exchanged.

Future: scalability through 3E ERC+, AI, and rising regulatory complexity

Ergon is now preparing to move its broader technology stack to SAP and its SDS Authoring workflows into 3E ERC, and Snow is clear about what she wants to carry forward. As that transition unfolds, 3E ERC gives Ergon a way to keep SDS authoring consistent even as the surrounding systems change underneath it. That continuity matters for a company operating in more than 100 countries, since it means the SAP migration doesn't force a reset of how safety data sheets are built and maintained across every one of those markets.

“We have the need for there to be consistency across all of our systems, across all of our multiple companies, and keeping 3E as that single source of information that we know is reliable is definitely beneficial to us as we're moving and upgrading and changing our systems,” she said. “We need to keep that single source of information.”

That same standard is shaping how Snow's team evaluates 3E's emerging AI capabilities.

“What 3E gives us is not only the accuracy, but traceability,”
she said. “We're most interested in those AI capabilities that
are built around validated compliance data, rather than
general-purpose AI information that they've just pulled from
all over the web.”

That confidence is by design. 3E's AI solutions combine secure generative and agentic AI models with the company's proprietary, expert-curated regulatory content, and every critical output passes through human validation checkpoints before it reaches a customer. Outputs stay traceable back to the source regulation, SDS entry, or supplier submission behind them, embedded directly into the same 3E Protect, 3E Insight, and 3E Exchange workflows Ergon already uses, so Snow's team can see not just an answer, but why it's right and what to do next.

Ergon has more than doubled in size since Snow joined the company, and she expects both growth and regulatory complexity to keep accelerating.

“3E hasn't just helped us with what we're doing now,” she said. “It helps us
prepare for future regulatory challenges or future acquisitions.”

The data behind the partnership

The classification and SDS accuracy Ergon's team depend on sits on top of 3E's 35-year regulatory data foundation, a library that spans more than 500,000 regulated substances and supports millions of SDS authored and managed annually. That same foundation powers 3E Insight's regulatory research and 3E Exchange, which connects Ergon to a global network of more than 200,000 suppliers and screens disclosures against hundreds of regulatory lists, including REACH, RoHS, TSCA, and California Prop 65. For a company with more than 100 facilities and a compact compliance team, that kind of scale is what makes a single source of truth possible.

A partnership that keeps paying off

“3E isn't just a software that we're using - it's how we manage
compliance,” Snow said. “We've standardized workflows, we've got trusted
regulatory data, and we've integrated compliance processes that have
helped us improve safety, respond to customers, and be prepared for
what's coming down the road.”

Over more than half of Mary Ellen Snow's career, that partnership has moved from paper binders to a single, trusted source of compliance truth built and increasingly the AI-powered tools that will help Ergon meet whatever regulatory complexity comes next.