Global Site
Displaying present location in the site.
Column
Respond to inevitable global environmental laws and regulations
Currently environmental laws and regulations in relation to chemical substances are legislated and enforced all over the world including RoHS directive and REACH regulations in Europe. Since the companies that do not comply with these laws are not even allowed to enter into the market, therefore the management of chemical substances has become a major challenge for the companies that need to take immediate and reliable measures with respect to the compliance of these laws and regulations.
However, if the engineering system and chemical substances management are not connected with each other, then quality assurance department and environmental promotion department need to investigate and aggregate the chemical substances contained in the product and take legal and regulatory decisions at the end of manufacturing phase after the product design is completed and product BOM is finalized, in order to comply with environmental laws and regulations. However, if such aggregated results which have been evaluated upon completion of engineering process are not in compliance with these laws and regulations, you will have to go back to the product engineering and restart the process from the engineering phase that can lead to the situation where the delivery date to the customer cannot be kept and launching the product into the market will also get delayed.
From now on, in order to speed up the product development process and ensure thorough compliance with environmental laws and regulations, compliance with environmental laws and regulations is required to be considered from the upstream phase of the product development process. Therefore, environment friendly product design such as aggregating the amount of chemical substances contained in the product and taking legal and regulatory decisions from the engineering phase and selecting the parts and material that comply with these laws and regulations from the beginning can be promoted by centralized management of the product information and chemical substances information contained in the product on the PLM and by sharing the information with each department, instead of having separate design systems and chemical substance management system.
Optimal data placement for a distributed development in global
It is necessary to consider the various issues (such as detailed security settings, exclusion control, mechanism for data sharing and data exchange in multiple countries via Internet, etc.) as requirements for designing IT system, in order to implement globally distributed development process. Furthermore, it is also important to consider where to place the large amount of engineering data such as drawings generated during manufacturing process etc. Especially, response process time would be slow when large capacity 3D data files placed in remote location are processed and it also causes the impact on operational efficiency, therefore measures such as placing the 3D data near to designer etc. needs to be taken.
Furthermore, even in the case of promoting localized design at overseas manufacturing site, if you want to share design assets with headquarters under your governance, then it may be appropriate to manage the centralized data in the country where head office is located. On the other hand, there are approaches that replicates the data of head office and deploy it at overseas manufacturing site, in order to promote localized design.
Distribution and arrangement method of engineering data to overseas manufacturing sites varies depending on the design approach, future business approach, circumstances at overseas manufacturing sites. Utilizing cloud computing would be the big turning point from the point of your company’s global IT strategy. The best data placement method needs to be selected according to the changes in the business in the future.