Regulatory Compliance

October 24, 2014 | Written by GreenSoft Technology, Inc.

The 5 Biggest Problems With Compliance Data Management

October 24, 2014｜Written by GreenSoft Technology, Inc.

Last week we reported on the recent study which found that electronics manufacturers spent over $700 million complying with the U.S. Conflict Minerals law, and the week prior we reported on the EU's paper on what to do when ROHS and REACH overlap. It is clear that complying with global environmental regulations is a confusing and expensive task.

Today we list the top 5 biggest problems that our customers face when managing their compliance data to meet global requirements.

1) The Bill of Materials (BOM) contains errors. In our experience, almost every BOM contains errors of some sort - typically manufacturer names and part numbers are listed incorrectly.

2) The supplier is unresponsive. For a variety of reasons, some suppliers are unresponsive or unwilling to supply full material composition data. When you require full material composition data to meet your regulation requirements, this obviously becomes a problem.

3) Information provided by supplier is incomplete. Even when suppliers are responsive to requests for full material composition data, the information they provide as a response is often incomplete and does not fully meet the manufacturer's needs. Sometimes suppliers will only provide a link to a website where the manufacturer can find the requested data rather than providing the actual data itself.

4) The supplier provides company-level compliance data instead of product-level data. When you are gathering full material composition data for your BOM, you need data for every single part number in your BOM. Sometimes a supplier will provide data at the company-level, stating that "all components provided by Supplier are in compliance" or something to that effect, when what you as the manufacturer need is data specific to each part number from that supplier. The trend is toward product-level declaration, so component or product-level declarations are clearly becoming necessary. We've found they're also becoming more common.

5) The data provided by all your suppliers came in various different non-standard formats. Once the BOM data has been gathered and validated, you still need to compile it and generate compliance reports from it, which requires the data to all be in a standard format. When you have hundreds of different suppliers providing information in various formats for a single BOM, standardizing the data becomes a very time-intensive task.

GreenSoft Technology's founders have been in the electronics manufacturing industry for decades, and when they saw the growing need for manufacturer's to create a compliance data management system, they started development of the GreenData Manager software to meet this need. For over 12 years now, GreenSoft has observed the roadblocks to compliance management and optimized our data management services and software to overcome these problems.

We review BOMs to validate the information and part numbers. We make repeated follow-up contact with unresponsive suppliers. We validate data supplied by suppliers, and break down company-level data by part numbers per your BOM. GreenData Manager software accepts data in various formats and standardizes it all to the same format for report generation.

Give your GreenSoft rep a call today at +1-323-254-5961 to learn more about how we can overcome your data management problems together.