What You Can Do To Make It Easy as 1, 2, 3

For high tech and electronics companies, managing an environmental strategy is increasingly on the mind of executives as the effects of mandates like RoHS and WEEE on the company’s bottom line are being felt. As the environmental strategy for companies continues to evolve, we anticipate that there will be a transition from environmental compliance data collecting and reporting to businesses adopting an environmental stewardship strategy. This greater environmental strategy expands from just eliminating lead and other hazardous substances in products, to management of energy use and resource consumption in the manufacturing and usage of electronic products. Many companies are beginning to design eco-friendly products which can open up new markets or prevent removal from existing markets.

The most successful companies will develop an environmental strategy as a competitive advantage and market differentiator, planning, designing and building eco-friendly products. PLM systems are the core set of enterprise applications that have the greatest impact on an environmental strategy. By utilizing these applications and providing the vision for the company’s environmental compliance strategy many companies can separate themselves from their competitors with their environmental stewardship strategy and create a competitive edge in the market. Let’s look at a few steps you can take to start in creating or expanding your environmental care strategy:

A – Ask – You must know where you stand in your efforts to protect the environment. Do an audit of all departments to ask about what people are doing, you may be pleasantly surprised to learn what is happening throughout the organization as it relates to environmental care.

B – Best Practices – Learn more about what best-in-class companies are doing. Most likely, companies have already begun to implement environmental care strategies and tactics. Talk to your peers in the industry to learn what works and what doesn’t. Educate yourself on the various mandates and look for opportunities to leverage what you may already be doing. One strategy is to focus on divisional or departmental efforts such as decreasing waste or energy consumption and elevate that to a corporate-wide level.

C – Culture – To implement a comprehensive strategy supporting environmental care and using it for a competitive advantage, often requires a change in the corporate culture. For example, at Siemens the Environmental Care mission is taken very seriously and we look for every opportunity to ensure that we are caring for the environment in everything we do. We have an Environmental Health & Safety chief who is in charge of our Environmental care processes and policies who reports to the highest levels of our organization.

D – Design Green – The greatest ability to impact whether or not your products comply with and exceed environmental requirements is during the design phase where you are picking components and parts. Processes should be in place that mandate checking for compliance at every stage of the design cycle. A software solution like Teamcenter for Environmental Compliance can assist you in sourcing from suppliers with compliant components and parts. Teamcenter for Environmental Compliance also allows you to grade the final BOM for pass/fail compliance status for mandates such as RoHS and WEEE. Goals and rewards should also be used to incent employees who actively support the Design for Green initiatives.

E – Expose & Promote – With an environmental care plan in place supporting the Design for Green strategy, you can now, with confidence, expose what you are doing to the market and promote the fact that you now support a GREEN strategy. This is where real-world competitive advantages are beginning to be seen. Tell your customers, partners and suppliers of your "green" efforts and show others your path toward Environmental Stewardship.

To learn more about what UGS PLM Software is doing to help high tech and electronics companies protect the environment, please join our upcoming Green Practices Seminar:

Beyond WEEE & RoHS: Toward Green Business Practices
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
12:00PM EDT (5PM GMT)

UGS PLM Software provides a comprehensive solution set for eco-friendly product design and environmental compliance management. From environmental planning with program execution and requirements management through design for compliance with integrated compliance analysis, material and substance management to compliance part traceability and reporting, the UGS PLM Software solution can provide it.

As part of Siemens we believe that actions speak louder than words. We have a long history of protecting the environment and committing ourselves to sustaining this planet's natural resources. We demonstrate this commitment through a mission statement and actionable policies that manifest themselves in:

• Product development processes that we use to design our own products with the environment in mind
• Manufacturing processes that we adopt to protect the environment and save energy
• Software products that we offer to enable our customers to Design “Green” while lowering the costs associated with compliance

To learn more about what we’ve been doing to protect the environment, view our environmental care policy. You can also learn more about using Teamcenter as a tool for environmental compliance, as well as other regulatory requirements, by visiting the Teamcenter for Compliance Management web page.