A bill of substance

Regulations like REACH and RoHS, which seek to restrict the use of hazardous substances in products, have created a new set of risks and challenges for all aerospace and defence manufacturers and their suppliers.

The EU's RoHS directive illustrates some of the risks posed by restricted substances and why defence exemptions don't completely solve the problem. Although aerospace manufacturers are exempt from RoHS and have no near term plans to comply, ROHS compliant (lead free) electronic components are appearing in the aerospace supply chain as suppliers discontinue non-RoHS components. This introduces the possibility of failures stemming from lead free solder and incompatible manufacturing processes.

Europe's REACH regulation, may present equivalent or even greater challenges. Whereas RoHS restricts about 100 substances in six categories in electronic products, REACH will restrict more than one thousand so called substances of very high concern (SVHC), many found in materials commonly used in aerospace and defence products.

The list of targeted substances critical to the function of aerospace products include: polybrominated flame retardants, cadmium, lead solder, plated nickel, refractory ceramic fibre and lead chromate.

As suppliers shift to safer alternatives, parts and materials that contain SVHC will become costly and difficult to procure. Worse, suppliers may change formulations in an uncontrolled manner without informing customers, impacting the end product's reliability and technical performance, both critically important in this sector.

To avoid the risks and costs associated with the rapidly growing list of restricted substances, aerospace manufacturers must: identify and track a constantly evolving list of high risk substances, collect and validate substance data from their direct material suppliers, understand and control the chemical content of their products and their suppliers products in a much more granular and comprehensive way to ensure quality and to identify at-risk substances as early as possible, and produce accurate product declarations regarding the substances in their products - declarations now required by their customers.

Traditional business systems do not manage product information at the material or chemical level, so they cannot be used to address these new business requirements. As a result, many manufacturers today simply cannot quickly and accurately determine what substances are in their products and how they are used – a critical capability gap.

Many companies initially develop a home grown system to manage this data, often supplemented by spreadsheets. Others attempt to customise their existing ERP systems, adding compliance attributes. These low cost approaches are generally not scalable and actually increase costs due to errors, redundant effort, and the need to repeatedly survey suppliers as requirements change.

As these approaches fail, companies are increasingly turning to more robust, scalable software solutions like InSight Environmental Compliance by PTC. InSight enables manufacturers to cost effectively manage the risks associated with restricted substances in their products. InSight provides a ‘bill of substance' view of the product during design and throughout the product lifecycle. Intuitive dashboards and status icons make it easy to pinpoint high risk substances early and take action.

With InSight, manufacturers can start collecting the right data from suppliers immediately. There's no requirement to change legacy systems or migrate product data. The system can connect to any PLM, ERP, or other bill of material management system at a later phase or during initial deployment.

Other features include: automatic supplier communication, data collection, and validation; a patented algorithm that provides highly accurate product assessments and declarations (with multi-source analysis, best and worst case analysis, ‘what if' analysis); industry leading functionality which enables a more proactive stance toward environmental requirements. For example, ‘suspect SVHC' tracking can serve as an early warning system by flagging substances that meet the criteria of a REACH SVHC.

www.ptc.com/go/insightec