Fast App: Motorola Develops Greener Products with Windchill Product Analytics from PTC

By DE Editors

Motorola, a Fortune 100 telecommunications company, designs and manufactures tens of thousands of products, ranging from cell phones and cable set-top boxes to police radios and wireless network equipment. The company operates under three separate business units: Mobile Devices, Home and Networks Mobility, and Enterprise Mobility Solutions.

The Challenge:  Complying with Global Environmental Regulations
As a global manufacturer, Motorola must ensure that its products comply with hundreds of environmental standards, including Europe’s Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive, the End of Life Vehicles (ELV) directive and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH). Outside of Europe, Motorola’s products must comply with many other derivatives of these laws, such as China’s own version of the RoHS regulation. All these regulations seek to restrict toxic substances in products, and can block the sale of non-compliant products. For Motorola,  millions of dollars in revenues are at stake.

To comply with these regulations, Motorola must track and control restricted substances in its more than 50,000 products. It’s a difficult task, made even more challenging by proliferating regulations,  complex products and the company’s vast global supply chain, involving thousands of suppliers and hundreds of thousands of supplier parts and materials.

Motorola’s initial attempts at assembling supplier part data and generating product reports were manual and time-consuming—a single report could take weeks to produce. This manual approach could not scale to meet the growing demands of the business. An automated software solution was needed.

The Solution: Windchill Product Analytics
After evaluating a number of solutions, Motorola selected PTC’s Windchill Product Analytics because of its scalability, its ability to automate many manual, time-consuming tasks, and its seamless integration with existing Motorola systems.

Windchill Product Analytics was also selected because it enabled Motorola to efficiently survey its supply base, analyze its products for compliance, and keep up with emerging environmental regulations—all while complementing the manufacturer’s existing system infrastructure and tools: CAD,  item master, product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), design-to-manufacturing (DTM), and other systems.

Another differentiator: Windchill Product Analytics enabled Motorola to track RoHS, REACH and other environmental specifications, as well as Motorola’s own harmonized, forward-looking environmental standard, a key component of its green product strategy.

The Results: Meeting and Exceeding Environmental Requirements
Windchill Product Analytics enables Motorola to achieve a number of its goals:

• gain visibility into the high-risk substances that are in its products;
• set goals for substances it wants to remove from products;  and
• verify and track product compliance relative to these targets, even as they change over time.

With Windchill Product Analytics, Motorola can more efficiently meet, and even exceed proliferating environmental product requirements.

“Because detailed substance data is what’s required for these regulations, we have all the information we need. We just put together specific reports,” says Gerald Sprague, principal software engineer and technical lead for Motorola’s environmental compliance system.

Motorola uses Windchill Product Analytics to reduce the cost of compliance, fulfill customer and regulator audits, and lower the risk of a compliance failure that might jeopardize product revenues. By providing engineers with visibility into environmental metrics early in the product development process, Windchill Product Analytics helps Motorola design green products from the outset, before they reach production

Reducing Supplier Part Cycle Time from 28 to 3 Days
Motorola is serious about collaborating with its suppliers to get the data it needs to ensure compliance with REACH, RoHS, ELV and other regulations. Windchill Product Analytics plays a central role in automating the collection and validation of all supplier part data, helping Motorola lower costs while ensuring greater data accuracy.

Average cycle time per supplier part is a key metric and indicator of costs. Cycle time includes requesting the data, validating it and correcting any issues, as well as overhead associated with communicating with and educating suppliers. With Windchill Product Analytics, the average cycle time associated with a new supplier item was reduced from 28 days to 3 days. This time-savings adds up, considering the enormous number of parts and suppliers that Motorola must manage. Currently, Motorola has received environmental information from 4,400 manufacturers for approximately 308,000 part numbers across 24 substance categories.

“Before implementing Windchill Product Analytics, Motorola was using massive amounts of spreadsheets to collect data from suppliers,”  explains Howard Heppelmann, senior general manager, PTC. “A couple of materials engineers would then consolidate the different spreadsheets to produce compliance reports for products. It took months to get the data from suppliers, validate it,  consolidate it and then send it to their customers. It was a slow, laborious and siloed process.”

Today, Motorola uses Windchill Product Analytics to help automate the process, along with industry standard data collection formats like Institute for Printed Circuits (IPC) 1752 and the AIA Compliance Connect spreadsheet. These formats essentially guide suppliers through the reporting process, performing data integrity checks, reporting down to the CAS number at parts per million (PPM) or mass level for each compound. Windchill Product Analytics provides additional automatic error checks and business rules checks as part of the supplier reporting process.

“Once a part has been graded, suppliers are not contacted again unless Motorola’s standard changes,” says Sprague.

Heppelmann notes that the savings from the Windchill Product Analytics implementation are significant.

“Motorola was using a cumbersome, non-repeatable process,  which didn’t allow the company to manage and track its compliance status in one, central location,” he adds. “No one has to manually request data from the suppliers now; it happens automatically.”

A Streamlined Process for Product Tracking and Reporting
In addition to the challenge of collecting and validating data from suppliers, Motorola faced a challenge on the product reporting side.

In the days before Windchill Product Analytics, once supplier declarations were collected and checked, it typically took Motorola engineers from one to four weeks—and sometimes longer—to calculate the compliance status of a product or part, and create a “rolled-up” summary for customers. Plus, having to manually account for content differences among multi-sourced supplier parts added to the bookkeeping nightmare.

“The Compliance Connect spreadsheet is not easy to read and becomes very cumbersome when you have an assembly with several hundred unique part numbers in it,” Sprague explains. “Even when we created some programs that would summarize the spreadsheets, it was still too cumbersome.”

Windchill Product Analytics eliminates this issue—common with most homegrown solutions—entirely, generating product compliance reports for customers and regulators, as well as best- and worst-case analysis and risk assessments, with just a few mouse clicks. Behind the scenes, Windchill Product Analytics records an exhaustive audit trail—tied back to each supplier declaration or data source—that’s available when and if needed. The supplier-decaled data may be reported in industry-standard formats, company-specific formats or simple certificates of compliance, depending on corporate policy.

A key benefit of Windchill Product Analytics is that it enables Motorola to tie its strategic goals and product environmental performance targets back to the data it requests from suppliers. Every Motorola supplier receives a consistent message and clear instructions on how to report the required data, which will be managed by Windchill Product Analytics and used to assess risks and measure product performance.

Ensuring “Green”  Designs from the Start
One of the biggest benefits that Motorola realizes from Windchill Product Analytics is its ability to incorporate environmental data regarding parts and materials into the product development process. Windchill Product Analytics is integrated with Motorola’s internal IT infrastructure,  synchronizing with data from product management systems and part management systems,  including CAD, PLM, DTM and ERP systems. As a result, compliance status is visible to all of the company’s designers, component engineers, commodity managers and manufacturing engineers.

Because Windchill Product Analytics is fully integrated with Motorola’s bill-of-material (BOM) management systems, including Siemens PLM Software’s Teamcenter and Oracle, compliance tracking and reporting is based on the true product structure—not on an out-of-date, manually assembled spreadsheet. In addition, a product’s compliance status is now visible throughout the organization, even at the earliest stages of a product’s development.

This quick access to accurate data and analytical results enables Motorola to incorporate compliance checks at various “gates” or stages in the product development process. It also ensures that Motorola products are designed to be “green” from the outset, avoiding costly after-the-fact redesigns. Sprague says there are environmental checks at several critical gates in Motorola’s process.

Users across Motorola’s enterprise have adopted Windchill Product Analytics at a rapid rate. Accessible with any Web browser, the software presents a quick and easy way to view BOMs, environmental data and the up-to-date compliance status of any part, material or product. At last count, more than 3,000 Motorola engineers were using Windchill Product Analytics worldwide. It plays an important role in Motorola’s ongoing efforts to bring environmentally friendly products to market.

Protecting Revenues and Building an Authentic Green Brand
Windchill Product Analytics builds an audit trail and provides evidence of due diligence, which is often required to pass audits by customers and government authorities. Motorola can now confidently communicate its policies regarding eliminating substances of concern, and prove to its customers, investors and other stakeholders that it is working to satisfy all environmental regulations. That proof comes in the form of hard data and an easily demonstrable closed-loop process—both provided by Windchill Product Analytics.

With the help of Windchill Product Analytics, Motorola achieved its yearly goals for meeting the ELV, RoHS and REACH regulations. Shortly after Windchill Product Analytics’ full deployment, Motorola passed several key customer audits, at the time representing 60% of its annual revenue.

With Windchill Product Analytics, Motorola now has an end-to-end system for centrally managing environmental standards, collecting data from suppliers, performing product risk assessments, and generating product compliance reports. Windchill Product Analytics provides enterprise-wide visibility that allows all key stakeholders in engineering,  procurement, manufacturing and other departments to access real-time information on the environmental status of parts and products.

Windchill Product Analytics is helping Motorola meet current environmental requirements, adapt as these requirements change, and prepare for future requirements. In this way, Windchill Product Analytics helps Motorola manage risks, protect revenues and build a reputation around the world as a leader in producing greener, more sustainable products.

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