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New RoHS compliance offerings
Rob Spiegel -- Design News, March 28, 2006
As the July 1 RoHS deadline nears, vendors in the electronics industry keep rolling out services to help companies comply the European Union’s RoHS and WEEE directives. Within a week, Design Chain Associates, Agile Software Corp. and Papros Inc. have introduced programs to help OEMs, EMS providers and component suppliers cope with environmental compliance.
Design Chain Associates (DCA) of San Francisco has just introduced a service designed to help OEMs in the electronics industry ensure their products are RoHS compliant. DCA offers a suite of services that includes:
• Gap assessment – looking at the company’s design, product lifecycle management and resource planning tools to make sure there are sufficient to help the company get compliant and stay compliant.
• Gap closure – seeking the best way to close any deficiencies in processes in order to get compliant and stay compliant.
• Process/tool/audit – This assesses whether the company can meet any audit demands for compliance.
• Best practices – this portion of the suite helps the company adopt practices that will ensure continual compliance.
Michael Kirschner, DCA’s president notes that “while there are various EU RoHS self-audit programs and narrowly focused RoHS audit services (and even a proposed industry standard for business process compliance that was rejected by the IEC) out there, nothing we have seen shows the level of understanding, depth or breadth of scope required to identify all the nooks and crannies in an electronic OEM that could be impacted by RoHS.” Kirschner says DCA developed its suite to help OEMs close the compliance gap.
Agile Software Corp, a San Jose, Calif.-based product lifecycle management company, had developed compliance management tools specifically designed to help small- to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) manage regulatory requirements. The Agile Product Compliance Management solution was created to be an affordable solution for SMEs to manage compliance without increasing their IT overhead. In a statement, Agile notes, “For SMEs, regulatory compliance management imposes a disproportionate burden. With smaller IT staffs and leaner budgets, SMEs cannot afford the additional burden of compliance management solutions.” Agile’s SEM product is designed to link all product content into a single system that provides visibility, enhances productivity and facilitates audits.
Papros Inc. is a San Jose, Calif.-based software company that has introduced a product named MRPRO which is designed to help companies meet RoHS requirements by integrating material data from a variety of sources. The MRPRO tools is designed to do take material content data in both industry-specific formats such as IPC-1752, as well as other formats and create a uniform directory of material composition data. When complete, the data can be viewed in spreadsheet format. “With MRPRO, you can import industry standard compliant XML or inputs from hand-held composition scanning instruments, or typical desktop engineering data from other sources,” says N. Nagaraj, president of Papros. He notes the final collection can be used in spreadsheet format or it can be written into an XML format that supports IPC-1752.
