Critical control processes to fulfil environmental requirements at the product development stage

Abstract

The European Union set the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive in 2003 to ban the import of electronic products that contain hazardous substances. To survive, electrical and electronics manufacturers have had to develop strategies to meet these requirements as well as search for new management methods that are feasible and have low risk. A number of studies have pointed out that a large portion of a new product's environmental quality (e.g. in compliance with RoHS) is determined at the beginning of the product development stage. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose, from a systematic point of view, several critical control processes applicable to the product development stage. Backcasting is applied for the process development. An internationally recognised quality management system, IECQ QC080000 HSPM, is referred to at the baseline step to help analyse a sustainability gap analysis of major flows. Unified Modeling Language sequence diagrams are further adopted to describe and specify the details of these processes. At the end, potential applications and possible extensive research projects are discussed. It is expected that the results can help firms gain effective control of product management.

Keywords:

• product development
• QC080000 international standard
• backcasting
• Unified Modeling Language
• sequence diagram

Notes

1. Those experts were project coordinators or managers in charge of the GPMS implementation in their companies, which are major NB manufacturers (i.e. ASUS, MiTAC, GIGABYTE and ECS) in Taiwan.

2. Since the implementation of EU RoHS, all suppliers of electrical and electronic devices exported to the EU have been required to guarantee that the content of hazardous substances in their products is lower than the level allowed. For some unqualified devices, alternative components or parts are still unavailable. To reduce the impact of this directive, the EU has set up a series of temporal clauses, allowing a number of items to be exempted temporarily. These clauses are thus called exemption clauses (Wang 2008).