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Materials declaration still in chaos
Rob Spiegel -- Design News, February 5, 2006
As the July 1, 2006 deadline nears for the European Union’s (EU) Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS), the flow of information that product manufacturers need to show they’re compliant is still a mess of varying formats. While two standards have emerged to help companies share information on the materials content of components, the standards are new and not yet widely used. To complicate matters, it’s becoming painfully clear that the electronics industry supply chain is just not accustomed to sharing information up and down.
JB Hollister of JB Hollister Consulting (JBhollister.com) notes that data sharing has been awkward at best. “This is the first time companies have had to stream information up the supply chain. And now there’s a lot of data flowing in different formats,” says Hollister. “In the future we’re going to see all kinds of data flowing, since other countries are coming up with new laws. But until now, information has never flowed.”
Hollister notes that it’s not flowing smoothly. “Most people are in a reactive mode and are they are just now developing their processes,” says Hollister. “The types of requests they are getting are infinite. They don’t have the data their customers want, so they turn to their suppliers, and their suppliers don’t have it.”
The data people seek is the breakdown of the materials inside individual components. The UK has already stated that companies will need more than simple certificates of compliance – letters that say such and such a component is RoHS compliant. The UK wants companies to show they have done their due diligence, meaning they have ferreted out the materials content breakdown for each component in their product and have also assessed the trustworthiness of each supplier. While the UK is the only EU country to specify this level of preparation, it’s widely assumed other EU countries will likewise want product manufacturers to show an audit trail on all of the components in their products.
To comply with this due diligence demand, companies up and down the supply chain are scrambling to obtain and deliver data. “This whole materials declaration problem is large and companies are responding to it in a reactive way. There is little thought about the strategy of it,” says Hollister. “They’re just saying, ‘Where’s the data?’ I don’t see a lot of companies figuring out how this all fits into a strategy.”
Part of the problem is that until very recently, there have been no available standards for communicating materials content. The Association Connecting Electronics Industries (IPC) will release its IPC-1752 standard in February. “We are very close to releasing the standard. We have all the votes as an accredited standards developer and we intend to publish it in February,” says David Bergman, VP of standard technology at IPC in Bannockburn, Ill. “We are really close. We just have to cross the t’s and dot the i’s in the language.” IPC rushed the standard through its development, comment period and voting in record time, but its still late to the party as the industry exchange of data escalates.
In the meantime, another standard has emerged to help companies deliver materials content. A consortia of companies including HP, Kemet and Agile and others has signed on to the Eco-compliance Declaration (ECD) Exchange Form. Unlike IPC-1752 which exchanges information in PDF files, ECD uses Excel files, which is more convenient for smaller companies that don’t have a substantial IT backbone. “What we like about it was that it uses an Excel format rather than a PDF,” says Mary Carter-Berrios, technical product manger for Kemet Corp. in Greenville, S.C. “Small companies are not ready for PDF files.” She notes that the ECD standard will end up compatible with IPC-1752, as the Excel data from ECD files flow nicely into IPC-1752.
