News and New Products

Distributors Beef Up RoHS Services

By Rob Spiegel -- Electronic News, 4/27/2006

Component distributors keep rolling out new services to help their customers grapple with the challenges of meeting the July 1 deadline for the European Union’s (EU) Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) legislation.

For small- to medium-size OEMs, distributors offer critical support in complying with RoHS. For the past two years, distributors have added services – some fee-based, some free – to help their OEM and contract manufacturing customers identify what parts are RoHS compliant.

In recent days, both Arrow Electronics Inc. in Melville, N.Y., and Chicago-based Newark InOne have added RoHS functionality to their part-identification tools. Arrow’s North American Components division has added a new feature to its search tool on Arrownac.com. The tool lets visitors quickly find the RoHS-compliance status on parts in Arrow’s inventory. Users can enter a part number into the site’s search function and the results will indicate whether the part currently in stock is compliant.

According to Darr Greenhalgh, Arrow’s director of supply chain solutions, the new functionality will serve customers who are seeking compliant parts, as well as those in the exempt industries – such as defense, aerospace and medical – who seek leaded parts. “We have it both ways, customers who want to know what parts are compliant and customers who want parts with lead in them,” said Greenhalgh.

Many in the electronics industry believe it will become increasingly difficult for those in the exempt industries to find leaded parts. “We’ve already seen a little bit of end-of-life notices from suppliers who are phasing out non-compliant parts,” said Greenhalgh. “This will happen to a greater extent as we get deeper into RoHS.”

As well as offering the free RoHS status look-up on parts in inventory, Arrow also offers a fee-based service that provides a deeper look into parts. This includes information of lifecycle status as well as design information. “We have a proactive software application that gives information to a buyer about the availability of the parts, design information,” said Greenhalgh. “It’s a self-serve application that is available on a subscription basis.” While most of the parts in the subscription service are components on Arrow’s linecard, the view of components does reach beyond those parts that Arrow carries.

Newark InOne has recently added advanced search functionality to its online catalog to give engineers and component buyers a look into the distributor’s database of 40,000 RoHS-compliant products. Visually, the catalog is a mirror image of the company’s print catalog of RoHS-compliant products, which groups components by type – rather than brand – for easy comparison. The online catalog also includes a guide to RoHS compliance.

The catalog is designed to help engineers and parts buyers reconcile part number discrepancies between compliant and non-compliant parts. Some suppliers changed their part numbers as they switched to compliant parts, while others kept their part number and used lot codes or dates to indicate compliance. For those who changed their part numbers, the catalog lists both the old and new numbers. “By scrolling over a part number, a pop-up window with the old part number will appear,” explained Susan Fischer, senior VP of marketing/eCommerce at Newark InOne. “This helps our customers to confirm that they are buying the right part.”