Usually this section is at the end of the newsletter. But we have some very exciting projects we are participating in that we think will be of value to you so wanted to make you aware of them.

July 21: Deadline to Lead-Free in GuadalajaraThe Guadalajara Chamber of Commerce sponsors our popular day-long seminar in beautiful Guadalajara, Mexico!
Contact Ana Lorena at the Gudalajara Chamber of Commerce, phone +52 (33) 37932140 ext 112, for more information.

July 26: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and the Alliance of Service Providers and Manufacturers presents An Interactive Panel Discussion of Industry Experts on The EU RoHS WEEE Directives
Michael Kirschner of DCA and experts from WSG&R, Symphony Consulting, Omnify Software, Ops A La Carte, Sun Microsystems, and Paramit present a morning workshop at the Palo Alto, CA WSG&R facilities. If you're in or near the San Francisco Bay Area, take advantage of this unique opportunity to learn from a broad group of industry-recognized experts how these Directives impact the entire enterprise.

“The RoHS and particularly the WEEE requirements are very complicated and are changing in real-time. The ASPMFG forum covered all the key areas for us. Their experts provided an excellent grounding on both WEEE and RoHS corporate requirements and responsibilities, and provided direction on how to focus our company effort in this area. The greatest benefit, however, is that these experts are available to provide us with on-going updates to these rapidly changing standards”. Robert Miller, Vice President of Socket Communications speaking about our last panel discussion.

July 28: Green SupplyLine presents An Editorial NetSeminar: Designing for RoHS
Michael Kirschner of DCA and Pamela Gordon of Technology Forecasters join Bruce Rayner of Electronics Supply & Manufacturing and Paul Goodman of ERA Technology Ltd. in a free one-hour online seminar to discuss how to design for the environment.

October 11 & 12 and November 8 & 9: Save The Dates! A Two Day Environment and Electronics Workshop!
First in the Boston area and then in Silicon Valley, DCA and some extremely knowledgeable consulting partners including EPTAC Corporation, Symphony Consulting, Technology Forecasters, and Natural Logic present intensive two day learning workshops. The first day is an update version of the DCA/EPTAC introductory Deadline to Lead-Free seminar we've been running around North America presenting for the last year or so. This seminar will touch on every aspect of environmental regulation for the electronics industry.

The second day provides four parallel, day-long in-depth workshops on

Pb-Free Manufacturing
Product and Supply Chain Transition Management
Design for Environment, and
The Executive View: A Strategic Approach to Environmental Regulation, or "If the EU has a 25 year plan, then you'd better too"

The goal is provide a single event that can be attended by key representatives from the different impacted functions in your company. Look for more information coming soon!

October 24 through 26: The Global Supply Chain Summit
DCA is a partner in this year's Global Supply Chain Summit (renamed so from the Supply Network Conference). Please visit the link above to learn more.

October 26: The Power Electronics Technology Conference
The Power Electronics industry is finding itself the target of substantial efficiency and stand-by power requirements world-wide, in addition to the material requirements we all know and love. Ken Stanvick talks about how to deal with all this regulation.

Design For Environment Considerations

The electronics industry is, for the most part, familiar with RoHS and WEEE from an operational and reactive perspective. What needs to be done by the product design engineering teams from product design guideline, business process, and supplier/component selection standpoints? Here are some of our thoughts.

Product Design Guidelines: Material restrictions are only the first step. The European Union has a long-term strategy to regulate the electronics industry (and other industries) for Environmental Compliance Requirements, with the rest of the world following their lead. With this in mind there are several key concepts to embed in product design guidance:
1. Develop a set of environmental guidelines appropriate for your company, your products, and your markets. In general these should drive to eliminate, as much as possible, hazardous materials whether currently restricted or not. As we've said before, these 6 substances are only the beginning, not the end.
2. Make material minimization a design criterion. If a component is available in a variety of package sizes and weights, which choice minimizes the absolute amount of material? Future requirements, like EuP, will measure products on this sort of criteria, among others. See section 3, below.
3. Consider the effort required to disassemble the product. This will directly impact WEEE costs. Dell, for instance, eliminates screws wherever possible.
4. Consider the reusability and the recycling value of both the actual product as well as the materials it's constructed from during definition and design. This, too, will directly impact WEEE costs by reducing the input waste stream.
5. Hewlett Packard marks each piece of plastic used in its products to help recyclers determine how best to recycle, reuse, or dispose of it.
6. Energy efficiency during operation, stand-by, and off states are already very important and are becoming increasingly so as much of the world works to reduce dependency on fossil fuels as well as reduce and ultimately decouple as far as possible the environmental impact of electronic products. The EU as well as many other countries around the world (including the US and California) already have legislation in place mandating reduced stand-by and off state power consumption as well as increased efficiency of power suppliers.
Business Process Guidelines: certain processes and tools will need to be tightened up or changed in order to ensure that your products meet the requirements of WEEE and, especially, RoHS.
1. Supplier selection: this is no longer just a matter of cost, quality, availability, and technical expertise. The supplier's ability to understand and manage the requirements for material specification and control throughout their supply chain now becomes of equal concern. You will also, sooner or later, have to start considering the Electronics Industry Code of Conduct as described in the December 2004 DCA newsletter.
2. Component selection: similarly, cost, availability, quality, and material composition are key. Define, like you currently do for these other parameters, what your material composition requirements are: do you require full disclosure? JIG A & B? Certificate only? Something else? How do you acquire and store this information? How will you use this data? Consider your Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) or Component/Supplier Management (CSM) tools' capabilities in making this decision.
3. New part request and approval: this will become a key mechanism to show "due diligence" should a question arise. Ensuring that this process includes a requirement to review material composition as required during the BOM development cycle will meet this requirement.
4. Component reuse: today you should flag parts at the internal part number level for its desirability for reuse. For instance, is a part "preferred" or "disapproved"? Consider environmental characteristics and material composition for its impact on your current flag definitions. If there are "shades of gray" (i.e., RoHS compliant but not JIG A compliant) in either the part or your requirements, a separate flag may be the way to accomplish this.
Supplier/Component Selection Guidelines:
1. Technical, manufacturing, and supply chain requirements that go in to selecting suppliers and components now must include environmental requirements. Make sure design engineers are educated on what key aspects of material composition are to be considered when selecting or specifying parts.
2. Regarding minimizing materials, for instance, a TSSOP package vs. a PLCC for the same device will contain considerably less material. Note that this is only one criterion; if the part ends up single sourced because of a choice like this, it may not be the best overall choice for the product.
3. Consider power consumption and, in the case of regulators and power supplies, efficiency. In situations where this is not a primary factor (e.g., servers and other infrastructure equipment) this can yield competitive advantage.
4. Understand the reliability and functionality implications of changing materials. Materials are chosen for a reason; any change will have both positive and negative implications. The component manufacturer may or may not be able to help you understand those implications, particularly the negative ones and especially downstream (such as manufacturing and reliability). Make sure you have the right people involved in the selection process.

Even if your products are not impacted by these regulations, consider whether a competitive advantage can be achieved by following them. And as a final thought, consider this: the World Commission on Environment and Development defines "sustainable development" as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". This is an important concept that explicitly underlies the drivers of environmental regulation of our industry as well as others in the EU and other countries. A goal of embedding this concept in to your corporate operations at a strategic level is not only "morally correct", but can yield your company and products a significant competitive advantage and, as Gil Friend of Natural Logic says, "regulatory insulation": being so far ahead of regulations that compliance is a by-product and not a goal. More on this in our next newsletter.

The DCA/EPTAC Seminar Attendee survey results

We sent a survey invitation to nearly 2000 of the 3000 people who have attended our webinars, netseminars, and Deadline to Lead-Free seminars asking them where in the RoHS and WEEE compliance process their company is. We had great response (as these things go), with 174 completed surveys. So what did you say? You said:

You've gotten off the dime and are dealing with RoHS. Only 1% (a statistically insignificant number) of you have completed the compliance process.
You're not very far along on WEEE compliance.
The chief concerns change as companies get further down the road to compliance. Initially, managing responsibilities between supply chain partners and concern over actually being able to build a product using Pb-free solder are foremost. However, the further along in the compliance process a company is, the less important those seem and the more important managing the product and inventory transition and ensuring that the supply chain is compliant become.
Finally, few are designing to reduce WEEE costs.

Read the full report on Green Supply Line.

DCA In The News

July, 2005: Supply Chain Challenges. Electronics Supply & Manufacturing Magazine. What are your suppliers' challenges? Available in print only.

June 14, 2005: Cops of the Global Village Fortune Magazine (6/27/05 issue). An excellent overview of why the EU, and perhaps China, is so far ahead of the US in driving corporate social responsibility in a number of areas.

June 1, 2005: The "greening" of the supply chain. Electronic Business. "It's hard not to get a little panicky over Europe's impending Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS)."

Contact and Feedback

We value your feedback and insights on the topics in this newsletter and others. You can contact us toll-free at the number below, or simply reply to this e-mail.

Best Regards,
Michael Kirschner

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Design Chain Associates LLC

www.DesignChainAssociates.com

Toll Free: 866.DCA.7676 x82