By Start Staff
Start Magazine
June 27, 2005

Doing business globally means compliance with new European Union directives Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) that will be in effect all too quickly, and will not be the first of their kind.

Specifically targeting environmental compliance, Precience Inc., www.precience.com, Silver Spring, Md., released Tornado Environmental Compliance Management for original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs) shipping products to the European Union market. The solution offers what the company calls a “quick jump-start” through on-demand access to CAPS Expert, an environmental reference database that contains nearly four million parts.

The solution will enable companies to reduce product qualification for compliance by months, and create a single global view of their parts and materials for reuse. What’s more, it is designed to be either a standalone workhorse or to be completely integrated within an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or a product-lifecycle management (PLM) system.

Many, if not most, compliance solutions come within a larger software package like PLM. Such is the case for fiber optic component manufacturer LuminentOIC, www.luminentoic.com, Chatsworth, Calif., that selected Omnify PLM by Omnify Software, www.omnifysoft.com, Wilmington, Mass., initially to streamline product development, but is now leveraging the software’s ability to aid in the design of products to meet the EU directives.

“Although the deadline for deployment of RoHS compliant products is still a little over a year away, design and requalification of compliant products is happening now. The Omnify PLM solution facilitates our RoHS compliant supply-chain management directives,” says Marco Comerchero, director of information technology for LuminentOIC.

According to the company, the software provides a means of classifying the complete material composition of a product and easily identifies it as either compliant or noncompliant, and can export all associated information and certificates into a “bundled report.”

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