PTC Tunes PLM for Conflict Minerals Compliance

Amidst the backdrop of an already complex regulatory landscape, manufacturers will soon be facing yet another compliance directive—this one requiring them to investigate the sources of certain materials for origination in the war-torn region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, companies listed on the U.S. stock exchanges have until May 14, 2014 to comply with a directive to investigate whether the sources of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold used in their products are from the region in question and thus are considered so-called “conflict minerals.”

It’s not just the 12,000 publicly-traded companies that are on the hook. The compliance requirements are applicable to the entire supply chain, which means the hundreds of thousands of component suppliers also need to have systems and processes in place to orchestrate compliance with the forthcoming conflict mineral regulations.

PLM, which has readily been established as an enabling technology for facilitating compliance with regulations such as REACH and RoHS WEEE, is expanding to help companies meet the challenges of new conflict mineral legislation. Siemens PLM Software, for example, is touting its Teamcenter Substance Compliance tool as a way to help companies deal with the new conflict minerals legislation, and Oracle is also talking up capabilities in its Agile PLM Version 9.3.2 as a framework for compliance.

PTC is being the most vocal about tuning its PLM platform for materials compliance. The new PTC Materials Compliance Solution, available as a managed service, is designed to give manufacturers a fast deployment option that will allow them to systematically access and report on the status of conflict minerals within their product lines and across their supply chains. PTC will install, operate, and maintain all the software and related infrastructure to support the solution, freeing up internal IT groups to focus on other initiatives.

“For many companies, there’s an urgency around this topic now and maybe they didn’t plan for the IT resources to go and tackle this issue,” explained Howard Heppelmann, PTC’s general manager, Supply Chain Management Segment. “This is really about enabling companies to quickly adopt and start using a solution that has some time sensitivity to it.”

Rather than addressing conflict minerals compliance as a separate task, PTC views the latest directive as part of a broad and integrated compliance initiative built around PLM.

“We view this as just another in a series of regulations that impact the materials used in products and in the supply chain … and there’s a natural fit with PLM,” he said. “Instead of looking at REACH and RoHS as a separate activity, we think it’s an opportunity for companies to establish consistent methods and processes for compliance related to materials and embed them early in the [design] process where decisions will have the most impact.”

Leveraging PLM as the definitive platform for tracking materials and reporting on compliance is even more important with Conflict Minerals, Heppelmann contends, given that this directive requires sign off by an executive officer of the company. “The CEO has to be directly involved and they don’t want to be on the wrong side of compliance issues,” he said. “They need to be sure they have pretty good data behind the report.”

This video provides an overview on how Windchill PLM can aid in regulatory compliance.