Last month’s column provided background on the International Electrotechnical Commission, one of only three standards-setting bodies recognized by the World Trade Organization. Readers may have asked, “So what?” The answer is that one of the three “schemes” within the IEC has provided the most credible approach for effectively managing hazardous substances in products and manufacturing.
Last month, you read that the IEC was 100 years old. The IECQ has been around for 24 years and is the IEC’s certification program for electronic components, processes and related materials. Some may also remember the European “CECC,” which merged into IECQ.
What’s important to know is that the IECQ is a well-respected international body that serves the industry with great credibility.
Addressing RoHS and WEEE compliance
Following the European Union’s issuance of the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directives, companies were left to their own devices in determining methods to ensure compliance. Most gravitated to elaborate supplier questionnaires, requests for suppliers to provide a written declaration that their parts were compliant to RoHS and WEEE, and to test incoming materials and their own finished products before shipping them. This was a new and significant burden in terms of time and resources for many companies.
At the same time, a number of consulting firms and other companies began to promote their own methodologies for achieving RoHS and WEEE compliance. Some of these schemes were thoughtful, some less so. Some embodied good insight into the science of testing, some didn’t. The major flaw with most was that they were very product-focused and were based on a statistically questionable product sampling.
A good deal of confusion ensued about many of these third-party schemes. Sometimes presented as total solutions, many were only targeted to address lead content. While the restriction of lead was a major issue for many electronics products, it wasn’t the only issue needing to be addressed for compliance.
A central question with the individual company-generated methodologies and the third-party schemes is, “Who would accept them as being legitimate in supplier-customer interactions, with EU entities, and with the various international government agencies?” This is a global issue. A majority of suppliers of electronic components are in Asia, and OEMs are scattered around the globe. The complexity grows geometrically as multiple RoHS- and WEEE-like regulations are introduced from various governmental bodies around the world.
These various compliance approaches have created a great deal of chaos and have not created the desired certainty that on a day-to-day basis a given manufacturer can rest assured their products will be accepted as fully compliant. This ambiguity seems to be encouraging a wasteful “ready-shoot-aim” reaction up and down supply chains.
Paradigm shift revisited
As companies learned years ago, when achieving quality improvement, testing alone has its limitations. For a time, the high-tech world was populated by masses of testers working near the receiving docks testing incoming parts and another mass of testers checking products before they went to the loading dock for shipment. We learned from the Japanese that it was much more cost-effective and far more beneficial to focus on developing a controlled, capable and reliable process to build quality in rather than trying to inspect it into the product after the fact.
Only now is this same understanding being applied toward the process of RoHS and WEEE compliance. The directives issued by the EU spelled out new hazardous substance restriction accountabilities for industry. Unfortunately, these accountabilities and what needed to be accomplished were imposed without guidance as to how to get it done. This has seemingly triggered a regression to our old mode of quality control.
Protecting ourselves and our customers from those who are noncompliant became the motivator for our return to screening and harvesting good product and scrapping noncompliant products. It’s very important for organizations to understand that the newer forms of RoHS that will soon be promulgated by China and Korea, among other countries, are specifically written to require evidence of a process management approach to ensure compliance.
A solution emerges
To leaders of Chinese Taipei’s electrical equipment and electronics industries, it seemed the best answer to this chaos would be a globally-accredited process management system that encompasses all the elements of hazardous substance restrictions in products and the processes that produce them. This approach will need to address the current EU RoHS and WEEE, as well as many other hazardous substance regulations cropping up around the globe, such as China RoHS and California RoHS.
More importantly perhaps, global organizations need a universally-accepted methodology for building processes that produce compliant products among suppliers and customers. With such universal acceptance, based on third-party certification, the industry can reduce testing, reduce supplier questionnaires to reduce compliance costs and allow for greater trust in supplier processes.
So where did the Chinese Taipei executives go for a solution? To the IECQ through its U.S. wing, the Electronics Component Certification Board (ECCB). With the challenge to create a robust framework appropriate for global industry, the ECCB drafted a document for consideration that built upon familiar conventions from the world of ISO standards, while including key elements that addressed the technical complexities inherent in hazardous substance process management.
The most current version of this document is known as QC 080000 IECQ HSPM. It’s quickly becoming the global solution for industry as more and more complex trade regulations come into force and the need for more cost-effective approaches becomes clear.
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