40 AEROSPACEMANUFACTURING | MARCh 2010
Design i Design for environment
A bill of substance
John Fox, PTC’s director of product and market strategy outlines the risks and
costs associated with restricted substances.
R
egulations like REACH and RoHS, which seek to aerospace manufacturers must: identify and track a constantly
restrict the use of hazardous substances in products, evolving list of high risk substances, collect and validate
have created a new set of risks and challenges for all substance data from their direct material suppliers’ understand
aerospace and defence manufacturers and their suppliers. and control the chemical content of their products and their
The EU’s RoHS directive illustrates some of the risks suppliers products in a much more granular and comprehensive
posed by restricted substances and why defence exemptions way to ensure quality and to identify at-risk substances as
don’t completely solve the problem. Although aerospace early as possible, and produce accurate product declarations
manufacturers are exempt from RoHS and have no near regarding the substances in their products – declarations now
term plans to comply, ROHS compliant (lead free) electronic required by their customers.
components are appearing in the aerospace supply chain as Traditional business systems do not manage product
suppliers discontinue non-RoHS components. This introduces information at the material or chemical level, so they cannot
the possibility of failures stemming from lead free solder and be used to address these new business requirements. As a
incompatible manufacturing processes. result, many manufacturers today simply cannot quickly and
Europe’s REACH regulation may present equivalent or accurately determine what substances are in their products and
even greater challenges. Whereas RoHS restricts about 100 how they are used – a critical capability gap.
substances in six categories in electronic products, REACH will Many companies initially develop a home grown system
restrict more than one thousand so called substances of very to manage this data while others customise their existing
high concern (SVHC), many found in materials commonly used ERP systems, adding compliance attributes. These low cost
in aerospace and defence products. approaches are generally not scalable and actually increase costs
As suppliers shift to safer alternatives, parts and materials due to errors, redundant effort, and the need to repeatedly
that contain SVHC will become costly and difficult to survey suppliers as requirements change.
procure. Worse, suppliers As these approaches fail, companies are increasingly turning
may change formulations to more robust, scalable software solutions like PTC’s InSight
in an uncontrolled manner Environmental Compliance. InSight enables manufacturers
without informing to cost effectively manage the risks associated with restricted
customers, impacting the substances in their products and provides a ‘bill of substance’
end product’s reliability and view of the product during design and throughout product
technical performance, both lifecycle. Intuitive dashboards and status icons make it easy to
critically important in this pinpoint high risk substances and take action.
sector. With InSight, manufacturers can start collecting the right
To avoid the risks and data from suppliers immediately. There’s no need to change
costs associated with legacy systems or migrate product data. The system can
the rapidly growing list connect to any PLM, ERP, or other BoM management system
of restricted substances, at a later phase or during initial deployment.
Other features include: automatic supplier communication,
“As suppliers shift to safer
data collection and validation; a patented algorithm providing
accurate product assessments and declarations (with multi-
alternatives, parts and materials
source analysis, best and worst case analysis, ‘what if’ analysis);
and functionality which enables a more proactive stance toward
that contain SVHC will become
environmental needs. For example, ‘suspect SVHC’ tracking
costly and difficult to procure.”
can serve as an early warning system by flagging substances that
meet the criteria of a REACH SVHC. ❙
John Fox, director of PTC
www.ptc.com/go/insightec
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