Power-Products Company Needed to Energize
Regulatory Compliance
t didn’t take long for APC to figure
out that it was going to be affected
by the European Union’s new ban
on hazardous substances in electrical products. A provider of power
and cooling products for commercial and
residential customers, the company was
squarely in the sights of EU regulators.
The rule known as RoHS, for Restriction of certain Hazardous Substances,
took full effect in July 2006, as part of a
broader regulatory regime called WEEE,
for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. Both were intended drastically to
cut back on dangerous substances within
many products sold or moved in the EU.
They were also likely to trigger similar
restrictions elsewhere around the world,
according to Raymond Lizotte, director of
the environmental stewardship office of
APC in West Kingston, R.I. So the company had to act fast.
The problem was that APC’s internal
procedures weren’t set up to make that
effort easy, or even possible. A look at its
own business operations and IT infrastructure quickly convinced the company
that it had no single place to manage the
information that was necessary for compliance. Responsibility was spread among
multiple functions, and there was no clear
way to ensure that APC was following the
dictates of European regulators at every
step of the supply chain, from product
design all the way to returns.
Acquired in 2007 by Schneider Electric,
a $25bn multinational, APC sells a wide
range of products, including uninterrupt-ible power supplies, cooling units, racks
and supporting software. It turns out
between 6,000 and 8,000 unique SKUs,
depending on how they’re counted. Taking
all components into account, that adds up
to some 300,000 individual products that
must be tracked and made RoHS-compli-ant. And while that number is dwarfed by
the parent company’s item master of more
than one million items, it’s high enough to
give rise to some huge headaches—and
I
potentially huge fines—if compliance isn’t
handled properly.
Lizotte’s first project upon coming
onboard in 2004 was to create an internal
process for conforming to the new requirements. Right away, APC determined that it
had neither the desire nor the resources to
build such capability itself. So it began looking for an outside software provider that
could meet its needs.
There were half a dozen vendors with
some form of compliance-oriented software. APC had two main objectives in
mind: the tool had to be reasonably
priced, and be easily usable by everyone
in the company on a daily basis. In the
end, says Lizotte, only one application fit
the bill: a product from Needham, Mass.-based PTC called InSight.
APC was drawn to InSight by its ability to pull compliance-related data from
existing Oracle Corp. enterprise resource
planning and database software, as well
as from a product development management (PDM) tool based on IBM’s Lotus
Notes. The integration freed APC from
having to input that data separately.
Moreover, the system can link directly to
all key business processes, so that compliance gets factored into every step of
development. A product can’t be
designed or sold until it has met the
RoHS criteria, Lizotte says.
APC’s suppliers provide the basic data
on the content of products and components. PTC InSight downloads an information request, which APC sends out to each
supplier. Once the responses are validated, they are automatically loaded into
APC’s database for use by all parties. A
spreadsheet program allows for the
upload of up to 10,000 parts from a single
