Beyond Your Recycle Bin

The area of going green goes well beyond the recycling bin in your garage. For manufacturers, the barrage of environmental regulation legislation is coming fast – by state, country, etc. What everyday consumers, like myself, see is media reporting on the high profile cases that resulted in compliance failures including Mattel Toys, Palm Treo 650 and the Sony Play Station. What consumers do not see is the passionate people trying to solve problems to save the environment.

This morning, I sat in on Seagate’s presentation that John blogged about. Following Seagate’s talk, Siemens PLM Software’s Kevin Faulds provide a review of Teamcenter’s compliance solution and how our customers can incorporate compliance information into the PLM backbone.

This included three main customer use cases:

• Data Collection & Aggregations

• Compliance validation

• Data exchange & Sharing

 

After Kevin’s brief introduction, John Fox from Synapsis Technology, the partner who helps us develop the Teamcenter module for compliance, gave an example using a cell phone. The cell phone is an assembly with multiple components, which may come from multiple suppliers. His example included 3 commercial parts: a capacitor, a resistor and an IC. Below that there are many manufactured parts.  There is a granular level of environmental (substance) data that must come from the suppliers. Teamcenter’s value is the ability to see which part had a partial fail for compliance and the ability to drill down into the BOM analysis in a very easy to use and understand interface. The real challenges our customers face is exemption management.

I stopped Andrew Wertkin, CTO of Synapsis in the coffee shop for a quick chat. He was off to the training session however he shared that customers are floored when they discover how easy it is. Red X means fail, green check means pass!