Clarity on PLM

Hear Jim Brown share his views on … efficiently and effectively meeting product environmental compliance demands using PLM software. This episode shares some interesting findings from Tech-Clarity’s Understanding Product Development Tradeoffs: Designing Products for Sustainability, Cost, and Compliance.

This is the latest edition of Tech-Clarity TV, let us know what you think.

The topics included in this episode include:

• Continued regulatory pressure from multiple sources
• Top 10 environmental regulations faced by global manufacturer
• Common negative business impacts from difficulty designing products for compliance, cost, and sustainability (including time to market and missed shipments)
• Increasing frequency (trend data) of these damaging business impacts
• Framework for environmental product compliance that shows the steps and capabilities required to design for compliance
• Discussion of how PLM meets the Tech-Clarity Compliance Framework

Let us know what you think. Do you agree? Disagree? Have a great example to share? Please see the related post, download the report, or review more free research and white papers about PDM, PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

A quick peek into some research on … how companies design their products to meet product environmental compliance, sustainability, and product cost targets. The report, Understanding Product Development Trade-offs: Designing Products for Compliance, Cost, and Sustainability, discusses how engineers and product developers can address these important aspects of their products early in the product lifecycle when designs are still flexible. Survey results and interviews show that while the market understanding of compliance and sustainability has matured, manufacturers are still facing the same challenges – and it has not gotten any easier.

The Research Findings

The report first talks about the challenges and the impacts that manufacturers face. By comparing to results in our 2009 report on Product Environmental Compliance, we were able to characterize some trends. From a compliance perspective, the regulations facing companies are relatively unchanged. The EU’s REACH and RoHS still top the list. To be clear, the regulations that companies are focusing on are the same regulations – but the regulations themselves have grown more challenging as they grow in scope and cover more substances.

One interesting finding is that more companies reported significant business impacts from these requirements. The table below, in fact, is a clear indication that more companies are suffering. One of the most interesting facts is that the only category that shows fewer people in it is “None” – which is down by 70%. Not a good sign!

So what is making this challenging for manufacturers? I will try to summarize the findings here:

• About one-half (51%) have difficulty understanding design tradeoffs
• Companies have a hard time collecting information on compliance, sustainability, and cost
• Survey respondents had difficulty making the right information available to decision makers in a timely manner

There is more detail on each of the individual areas in the report, it is worth a read (or at least a skim to look at the charts and callouts).

Implications for Manufacturers

So what does this mean for today’s manufacturer? The job is getting more difficult, and gathering and sharing information so people can make good design decisions is a huge challenge. But there is hope. As the report says, only 11% of the companies surveyed have information on cost, compliance, and sustainability in a single system. In fact, 41% have disconnected systems for each. No wonder companies have difficulty making tradeoffs. As you have heard me say before, there is a significant opportunity for manufacturers to address compliance as a part of their PLM implementation. This is also true for other product analytics and “design for” processes such as cost and sustainability that rely on good product data.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on designing products for compliance, cost, and sustainability. I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective. Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity. In particular, you might be interested in my views on designing for product cost and product cost management (PCM) or my post on the need to reduce the compliance tax on product innovation.

I had the chance to talk with … Sustainable Minds CEO Terry Swack late last year about their entry into the software world. The company introduced their on demand, green product design software to help manufacturers develop greener products. Sustainable Minds is furthering their ecodesign services by offering companies the ability to measure – and reduce – the environmental impact of their products early in the product lifecycle.

What do they Do?

The key to what Sustainable Minds offers is the ability to help companies make design trade-offs based on objective impact critera. Their product, Lifecycle Analyzer (LCA), allows companies to take a holistic look at the way their products affect our planet, including the energy used to produce it, logistics impact, energy to operate in use, packaging, and consummables. Their methodology, “Okala,” includes “impact factors” that allow designers to compare different options in systematic, repeatable, measurable way. I was impressed that the methodology is based on sound science and data from sources such as the EPA, giving the impact factors credibility. Okala is a single figure scoring system that includes 10 impact categories, over 550 impact factors, and CO2 equivalent values. Although there is no way to truly estimate how “green” a product is, the methodology and software provide a logical way to compare options in a meaningful way.

What do they Offer?

The LCA solution is made to work in conjunction with other solutions like CAD and PLM. For example, it can import a bill of material (BOM) from a CAD system to help engineers understand how “green” their products will perform. By wrapping LCA into the new product development (NPD) process, companies have the opportunity to make environmentally-friendly decision when they still have the flexibility to make decisions that won’t adversely impact product performance or cost, changing “green” from an afterthought to a design parameter that can be tracked.

Sustinable Minds also offers a Learning Center and a community to help companies adopt ecodesign strategies. They also leverage a database with impact factors and offer a process as well as tool. While most companies struggle today with just a process, this broad offering provides a way for companies to get started and makes analyzing design impacts realistically achievable.

Who do they Work With?

LCA is an early product, and Sustainable Minds has been running successful beta pilots. The goal is to work with manufacturers, consultants, and education to promote ecodesign. The company plans to roll out 12 industry modules, so they are thinking very big.

So that’s what I hear from Sustainable Minds, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

What I learned this week … came from a post that I found in a Consumer Reports blog. The article,  Tailgating Alert: Gasoline-powered blender banned by California Air Resources Board could have come out of the Onion because it is pretty over the top (who needs a blender with handlebars!?). But the punch line is not funny for the manufacturer in Phoenix, who probably had no idea that they were violating a California law and got slapped with a $240,00 fine.

The Lesson Learned?

I am not going to go into detail on this particular case, as much as anything I liked the picture. But the implications are real, and can serve as a wake up call to manufacturers. Compliance is serious business, and getting it wrong can cost a lot of money.

More to Come – Upcoming Research

I am in the process of finalizing a research report on product environmental compliance that deals with RoHS, REACH, and other product-related compliance issues. I will share more when I roll that out. Coincidentally, one of the biggest challenges identified with REACH was understanding the regulations. As one Phoenix-based manufacturer just found out, ignorance of the law is not an excuse. I hope that the regulators don’t make too big an example of them, I picture two guys in a garage trying to figure out how to keep from losing their shirts. But the regulators are clearly sending a message that they are ready and willing to enforce their mandates.

So I will share more of my thoughts (and a framework for product compliance) soon. For now, that is one heck of a blender! I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it.