Synapsis environmental compliance software supports China RoHS

"We're finding that the number one compliance concern among manufacturers right now is China RoHS, particularly the disclosure and documentation requirements that went into effect this month," said Lonnie Gillihan, Synapsis' president, in a statement. "China RoHS is bigger than EU RoHS ever was because the scope of the law includes more industries, companies, and products."

The China RoHS regulation, officially called the "Management Methods for Controlling Pollution Caused by Electronic Information Products Regulation, will require manufacturers to limit the use of six hazardous substances in their products, which are the same six substances specified in the European Union's RoHS directive: lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB), and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE).

Unlike its European counterpart, China RoHS requires disclosure in the form of a specific "x-and-o" chart as described in China's industry standard document, Marking for Control of Pollution Caused by Electronic Information Products (SJ/T11364-2006). This chart shows the presence or absence of each of the six substances with respect to specified thresholds broken down by part or subassembly, said the company.

Designed to minimize the risk of compliance failures and reduce the cost of compliance, the EMARS solution delivers several new features including the capability to generate an accurate declaration chart in the "x-and-o" format specified by the China RoHS directive. EMARS users can generate a completed chart that accurately reflects a product's composition in minutes without manual loading of a product's bills of materials (BOMs) is because BOMs can be accessed "as-is" from most major enterprise data systems, said company.

Other features include rollups of complex, multi-level product BOMs into a single "x-and-o" chart, and drill down analysis on any "x-and-o" chart. Users can configure chart rows to represent major subassemblies of the product, individual components, or any grouping in between. In addition, users can determine what supplier part or material is contributing to a compliance failure and why it is causing the failure, enabling users to take corrective action.

The new module also allows users to perform worst-case analysis on all multi-sourced component permutations of a product as well as best-case analysis to identify scenarios that meet shipment goals. These analysis reports can be used to support "design for compliance" initiatives, said the company.

In addition, the solution allows users to keep up-to-date as the China RoHS regulation changes. EMARS maintains the latest substance lists and thresholds associated with the China RoHS law as they are implemented.