News and New Products

PLM Companies Develop Compliance Support

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

As the July 1 deadline nears for the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) regulations, product lifecycle management (PLM) companies are offering environmental compliance solutions. Both Agile Software Corp. of San Jose and Arena Solutions of Menlo Park, Calif., have announced programs designed to help customers manage their compliance with environmental regulations.

PLM companies are well-suited to support compliance, as they are already geared up to work with product data. “Since we manage the product lifecycle, we try to improve product profitability. We try to get products to market better, faster and cheaper,” explained Dries D’Hooghe, director of product strategy and marketing at Agile. “If you’re non-compliant, you can’t get to market.”

D’Hooghe views compliance support as a means to mitigate product risk. Making certain that a product is compliant, making sure the components in the product have multiple compliant sources, and making sure you can back up compliance claims with data ensures the product is safe in the market. “It’s cost avoidance,” said D’Hooghe. “When you design a proposal for a product, you want to evaluate it for compliance. If you have a single-source risk, you have to propose a remedy.”

D’Hooghe notes that Agile comes by its compliance strategy from its work in the heavily regulated medical device industry. “We apply the same rules we learned while working with medical companies,” said D’Hooghe. Medical device companies use PLM tools to validate their compliance with regulations and they provide auditors with a view of that compliance, showing their due diligence. Agile brought that same business produces to environmental compliance for electronic products.

The process of proving compliance involves a great deal of data, and Agile has turned to the newly released IPC-1752 standard to help manage the flow compliance data from component supplier to OEM. “In order to assess compliance, you need a mass of data, and in order to get that data, you need a communication vehicle,” said D’Hooghe.

He noted that until IPC-1752 was released, data came in multiple formats. “Up until now, it’s been coming in XML, PDF files, Excel, anything and everything. That’s not conductive to quick turnaround for prototypes or design.”

IPC’s 1752 standard will help companies bring that mass of data into a manageable form. “The IPC standard is working to solve this problem because it’s support by industry big wigs,” said D’Hooghe. “Most of the industry will support it, and that will take care of the most time-consuming piece of compliance, the communication of data.”

Both Agile and Arena note that complying with environmental regulations has become an ongoing need that will stretch far beyond the RoHS deadline this summer. “We’ve entered the era of responsible manufacturing,” remarked Michael Topolovac, CEO of Arena Solutions. “RoHS is just the beginning of that. Next comes California RoHS.”

He noted that compliance will likely spread to areas beyond the RoHS ban on six specific hazardous substances. “RoHS is part of a large move toward environmental compliance,” says Topolovac. “When July [the RoHS deadline] comes to pass, we’ll see more regulations.”

Agile’s D’Hooghe agreed that RoHS is the beginning of a new wave of regulations that will keep compliance on the front burner for the electronics industry for many years. “RoHS is just the first,” he said. “Now you have the China RoHS, the California RoHS, and it going to get worse and worse.”

He noted that companies will have to automate the process of managing compliance information to keep up with ongoing regulations. “The first time you comply, you can do it manually, but at some point it’s going to be so expensive you have to go with something that’s integrated,” said D’Hooghe. PLM companies are stepping in to help companies move to an integrated system for managing compliance.