Make Environmental Compliance Part of Product Development

To stay competitive in today’s market, many manufacturers’ list environmental compliance and product sustainability as key elements for success. To support your environmental compliance objectives, you need a sustainability framework built on a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) foundation that allows you to phase-out non-sustainable components and materials, and design-in new and innovative ’green’ alternatives.

As the momentum to ‘go green’ continues to build across the globe, the number of environmental regulations for reducing hazardous substances keeps growing. At the same time, more and more customers are now setting their own environmental requirements, which is adding even more complexity to the mix. Ignoring the issue is not an option, as the consequences of non-compliance – public relations nightmares, delays resulting in missed consumer trends, blocked shipments, costly redesigns, and scrapped products – can be devastating to an organization’s bottom line.

Image source: Pixabay

To avoid these costs and enable product stewardship, companies need to precisely identify, track and control a constantly evolving list of high-risk substances, both in their products as well as those in their supply chain. Additionally, companies must better manage reports that involve testing and certification for products and materials. Unfortunately, spreadsheets, homegrown databases, and manual processes simply can’t meet this enormous data management challenge. 

Managing the environmental performance of a company’s products is not a one-time project. It’s an ongoing issue that must be integrated throughout the entire product lifecycle – starting from the moment that market requirements are developed, to the time when new products are introduced and new materials and suppliers are qualified. By building environmental compliance into the earliest phases of product development, where decisions have the most impact and are least disruptive, companies can save money and bring compliant products to market faster.

Technology like PLM helps to address environmental compliance early in the design cycle. PLM allows you to centrally manage, track and report all product content and associated compliance information from vendor certificates of compliance to vendor datasheets, and provides engineers with key compliance information to make better design decisions up front. Being flexible and creative in utilizing PLM’s document vaults, inserting key customized attributes, and structuring report options allow for more productive updating of the rapidly changing requirements and prompt retrieval of data to make informative decisions at design, for supply chain during production, as well as Quality for reporting and Customer requirements.