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40% of material declarations have errors
Rob Spiegel -- Design News, June 29, 2006
According to Agile Software Corp. of San Jose, a product lifecycle management (PLM) firm that helps companies grapple with RoHS compliance, as many as 40 percent of the materials declarations presented by component suppliers contains errors. That could mean that companies that think they have compliant products may be in jeopardy of non-compliance as the RoHS deadline hits July 1. “On paper these manufacturers are ready, but they don’t know if they’re really ready given high amount of errors in material declarations,” says Dries D’Hooghe, director of product strategy marketing at Agile. “When push comes to shove, manufacturers don’t know if they’re ready.”
One of Agile’s services is helping its customers sort through compliance documentation to make sure it’s valid. “We have a module to our PLM services that gathers information and materials content from suppliers,” says D’Hooghe. “We manage and validate the data, and we also challenge the compliance information from suppliers.”
One of the problems that has pestered manufacturers – as they prepare their due diligence data to show European administrators they’ve taken all reasonable means to make sure their products are compliant – is the difficulty of managing hundreds, even thousands of material content declarations in multiple formats. The Association Connecting Electronics Industries (IPC) has released a standard, IPC-1752, for communicating materials data. While the standard has not been widely adopted yet, D’Hooghe expects the standard will eventually become widely used. “IPC-1752 is certainly the standard that is getting the most backing,” says D’Hooghe. “There are some standards in Europe, but they’re not getting much traction in the U.S.”
D’Hooghe sees another environmental compliance problem looming on the horizon for manufacturers: new regulations from China, Korea and California that come with 2007 deadlines. “The danger of multiple regulations is real. They are similar in that they ban the same substances, but there are differences in what exemptions they allow,” says D’Hooghe. “There are also differences in how you have to label you products.”
One of the questions facing manufacturers in a world of multiple regulations is how to build a global product. The idea of creating different products for different markets in untenable in a world where products are allocated to world markets based on demand. A slow-moving product in Europe gets shifted to North America or Asia. “The big manufacturers track legislation from all over the world and build products that comply with specifications that will work for every market,” says D’Hooghe. “If you don’t, than your product may not be compliant if it’s diverted to another market.”
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