Authored By:
Tedie West
Kerri Doyle
Siemens PLM Software
Plano, Texas
Summary
Sustainable product design and the task of bringing new, earth friendly products to market is a top priority for corporate leaders in the manufacturing industry. By not reaching their compliance and sustainability goals, manufacturers risk loss of market share, fines for non-compliance against regulatory directives and possible damage to their brand. Managing material disclosure information from the supply chain is one of their biggest challenges.
On average, 80% of manufactured products today are comprised of components sourced from suppliers. This means that if the manufacturer's goal is to understand how sustainable or compliant their product is, they must first pull all of the supplied parts into the product picture before doing any type of sustainability or regulatory analysis. This is no small task, especially for manufacturers dealing with 100s to 1000s of suppliers and supplier parts within a deep multi-level supply chain.
The increased need to sell products in global markets, where a large portion of the product contains components sourced from around the world, coupled with the trend for higher product complexity adds another layer of challenges to manufacturers in trying to gain holistic views of their products in order to check for compliance against regulatory and industry directives. The most complex and tedious part of compliance and sustainability is getting accurate and complete data from suppliers.
Manufacturers will need to focus on supplier interaction and automation of that process using a multi-faceted and "best-practice" approach, which could include functions such as: email interaction, web portals, integration to on-line databases, engaging third party data collection agencies, general PLM framework capabilities to exchange different document types, support for industry standards and full material disclosure from suppliers.
Using an enterprise PLM framework to automate the process of gathering and managing supplier disclosure data, manufacturers will not only benefit today in addressing current sustainability challenges and gaining a competitive edge, but also tomorrow in addressing future needs and requirements to produce earth friendly, innovative and compliant products.
Conclusions
To summarize, regulatory compliance and sustainability goals are becoming increasingly important for manufacturers. Reaching these goals is a time consuming process, and more of a journey than a destination, but will be an important differentiator for your company and enable you to have a competitive advantage. A sometimes difficult and time-consuming part of this journey involves interacting with your supply chain to get accurate and complete information about the parts they supply to you that are often critical components in your products.
Before beginning this process consider the many sources of data that are available to you and work towards getting full material disclosure from your suppliers. In addition, this process will be much more automated and repeatable if you utilize industry standards for data exchange and fully leverage the enterprise software available to you.
Initially Published in the IPC Proceedings
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