June 29,
2006
RoHS Hampers
Product Innovation
For the
past two years, design engineers have been working to comply with environmental
legislation such as the European Union’s (EU) Restriction of Hazardous
Substances (RoHS), which goes into affect on July 1. While many in the
engineering community thought the switch to lead-free components to satisfy
RoHS requirements would be a one-time activity, designing products for
environmental compliance has become an ongoing challenge. This is especially
true as countries outside Europe develop their own environmental laws that
differ from the EU’s RoHS. With all this pressure to fix existing products,
design teams are finding they don’t have as much time for new product
innovation.
The
burden of compliance has clearly piled up work for design engineers. “Design
engineers have more work now. I’m starting to hear this a lot,” says Dries
D’Hooghe, director of product strategy marketing at Agile Software Corp., a San
Jose, Calif.-based company that creates tools to support the design process.
“They have more work now because they have to design products for compliance.”
D’Hooghe
notes that the work of designing for environmental compliance is not a one-time
event. Instead it has become an ongoing part of what design engineers have to
contend with as they look at each design project. “In the past, design
engineers designed for manufacturability, and for supply chain,” says D’Hooghe.
“Now they have to design for environmental compliance. As they spec each
component, they have to see if it’s compliant.”
Designing
for compliance also goes beyond checking to make sure a particular component
meets RoHS rules. The process also involves making sure the component comes
with its appropriate materials declaration so the manufacturer can prove to governmental
entities that govern compliance that they took all appropriate measures to make
sure the product was designed to comply with RoHS. In addition to these
compliance measures, design engineers also have to make sure their products are
designed for specific lead-free manufacturing processes that involve different
reflow temperatures than manufacturing that uses leaded components.
A
further deterrent to new product development for design teams is the work they
have to do to redesign existing products for compliance. Manufacturers have
generally not hired new design engineers to cope with the task of revamping
existing bills of materials (BOMs) to make sure they are compliant. Under these
conditions, design teams have not been able to focus on new product design to
the extent they have been able to in the past. “Has all this hampered
innovation? It has certainly made it harder,” says D’Hooghe. “There really is a
bump in the road for innovation. There are still new products like iPods coming
out, but the workload on the design engineer has become more difficult.”
The
work of product innovation has been further stymied by other factors in the
design engineering community. For one, design teams are smaller than they were
just a few years ago. During the downturn after the dot com crash in 2000, most
manufacturers severely trimmed their design team population. When demand picked
up over the past two or three years, most of these companies did not rehire
design engineers to previous levels. Plus, with the beginning of the baby-boom
retirement, many companies are starting to lose design expertise through
retirement.
Another
challenge facing design teams is the pressure to move product from development
to product more quickly. Increased competition – particularly in consumer
electronics – is forcing OEMs to condense the design process. “The design time
and the design population are both shrinking,” says D’Hooghe. “So design
engineers have less time.”
In
response to the pressures put on design teams, many manufacturers are turning
to outsourced design solutions rather than hiring new design engineers. In some
cases they are using the services of outside design firms. In other cases, they
are turning to Asian-based ODMs (original design manufacturers). These companies
offer product design with their outsourced manufacturing services. This trend
began with low-end laptops and cell phones, but these services have expanded to
include a wide range of consumer products.
The
outsourced design trend affects innovation greatly, since it means that OEMs
may be giving up their product knowledge as they give up their design work.
While it is hard to judge whether RoHS had directly impacted new product design
(we can’t count products that haven’t been created), it is also hard to imagine
that the pressures from environmental compliance haven’t severely hampered
innovation.
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