Material compliance software for manufacturers

What is material compliance software?

Material compliance software tracks what a product is made of against the substance restrictions that apply to it — EU RoHS, REACH SVHC and the Authorisation and Restriction lists, SCIP, POPs, California Proposition 65, TSCA, and conflict minerals reporting. The work is mostly supply chain data: collecting declarations from suppliers in formats like IPC-1752A, IEC 62474 and the CMRT, rolling component data up to the finished product, and producing a declaration when a customer or an authority asks for one.

How is material compliance different from product compliance?

Material compliance is a subset. It asks what the product is made of and whether those substances are allowed. Product compliance is the whole obligation set for putting that product on a market — substances alongside safety, EMC, radio, energy and ecodesign, packaging and EPR, and cybersecurity. A tool that only does substances answers one question well and leaves the rest in spreadsheets. Certean treats substances as one regime among several, on the same product record.

Can a PLM manage RoHS, REACH and conflict minerals compliance?

A PLM holds the bill of materials and the part data, which is where the answer belongs, but it does not hold the restriction lists and it does not know when they change. It cannot tell you that a part cleared two years ago is now restricted in one market and not another. What works is a material compliance layer that reads the BOM out of the PLM, collects supplier declarations against it, maps each substance to the restriction in force in every market the finished product is sold in, and writes the status back.

How do you keep supplier declarations current?

The usual failure is not collection but currency: a declaration is gathered once and never refreshed when the substance list moves underneath it. Certean dates every declaration against the version of the list it was made under, flags the parts whose evidence has gone stale after a candidate list update, and shows which finished products depend on them — so a request goes to the twelve suppliers it concerns rather than to all four hundred.

What does RoHS compliance software need to do?

RoHS restricts ten substances in electrical and electronic equipment, measured per homogeneous material rather than per product, which means the answer lives at the level of the part and not the assembly. Software for it has to hold declarations at that level, roll them up a multi-level bill of materials, track the category exemptions that apply and the dates they expire on, and produce the EU declaration of conformity that cites the result. RoHS also rarely travels alone: the same parts carry REACH, POPs and often Proposition 65 questions, so a tool that answers only RoHS leaves three more to answer elsewhere.

How do you prioritise which substance risks to deal with first?

By exposure rather than by the order the alerts arrived. The inputs are which markets the product is sold in and how enforcement works there, the volume shipped, how close the measured concentration is to the threshold, and how old the supporting declaration is. Certean scores open substance issues on those and ranks them, which matters most where a team of three carries several hundred SKUs.

What is a SCIP notification and when is one required?

SCIP is the ECHA database of articles containing substances of very high concern above 0.1% w/w. Any company placing such an article on the EU market must notify it, with the substance, its location in the article, and safe-use instructions. The duty attaches per article, so a candidate list addition can create notifications across a catalogue at once. Certean identifies which articles are caught and holds the data the notification needs.

Substances are one regime of several. See what else is on the product record, or read the comparison of product compliance platforms.