1 About Agile Product Governance & Compliance

Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) is designed to help manufacturers manage all kinds of product compliance, including the ability to audit the presence and amount of regulated substances used in their products, and to demonstrate that they responsibly dispose of, recycle, or re-use parts containing those substances.

1.1 Compliance Regulations

OEM manufacturers are required to take global responsibility to dispose of, recycle, or re-use electronics that contain hazardous substances. In addition to satisfying FDA regulations and ISO standards, any company that sells electronics equipment in an international market is subject to the OEM manufacturing regulations of their target markets. These may include one or more of the following:

United States: Good Manufacturing Practices; ISO Standards; U.S. Food & Drug Administration regulations
Good Manufacturing Practices; Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical Substances (REACH); Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS); Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)
China: Restriction of Hazardous Substances (China RoHS); Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (China WEEE)
Japan: Japanese Green Procurement Survey Standardization Initiative (JGPSSI)
International: Joint Industry Guide (standards adopted by international companies, including IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, others)

1.2 Cycle of Compliance Data-Gathering and Corrective Action

This figure depicts a process of due diligence concerning the compliance of existing products and new product designs. This is a "closed-loop" compliance corrective action process. Other Agile solutions - Product Collaboration, Product Quality Management, Product Cost Management, Product Portfolio Management - manage areas around the lower half of the circle. Product Governance & Compliance manages the compliance data-gathering area.

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1.3 How PG&C Helps You Gather and Manage Compliance Data

People who manage the compliance process at the "buyer" site - compliance managers - must ensure that their company's products adhere to government regulations and company policy. Agile PG&C helps you gather and analyze compliance data and to take appropriate corrective action.

PG&C is not only a communication vehicle between the compliance manager and information suppliers: it also manages the compliance of parts across multiple suppliers and multiple manufacturer parts.

Ultimately, PG&C rolls all this information up to provide a product-level view of compliance.

More specifically, compliance managers use PG&C to:

Collect data about materials used to manufacture a product
Review compliance across the Approved Manufacturers List (AML) of a part, across multiple suppliers (the Approved Suppliers List, or ASL), across BOMs, subassemblies, and of final products
Generate reports to show the level of compliance
Manage supporting documentation, such as descriptions of current regulations, recovery manifests, disposal certificates of destruction, supplier compliance surveys, and other customer-specific specifications.

Compliance managers often get compliance information for manufacturer parts from an information provider or collect the information via IPC standard/Excel spreadsheet and then load the collected compliance data into a PG&C declaration. Often this process gets automated via Customizations/Process Extensions.

In another scenario, at the supplier site, information suppliers use PG&C to complete and sign off material declarations:

Declare compliance with specifications concerning hazardous materials that may originate from its customers and from government agencies
Disclose which hazardous substances are contained in the components and subassemblies it provides.

1.4 Agile PLM Documentation for PG&C

The Preface of this manual provides the URL to Agile documentation for current releases of Agile PLM. This manual assumes that Agile PLM has been installed and an Agile administrator has created Agile users with assigned roles that facilitate their work.

1.4.1 PG&C User Guide

This manual, PG&C User Guide, is a complete manual for working in the Agile PG&C solution. It describes how to work with the PG&C-specific business classes in Agile PLM and the Request For Information (RFI) compliance process.

1.4.1.1 Solution-specific Documentation for the PLM Administrator

Agile PLM end-users do not generally need to consult the Agile PLM Administrator Guide. The PLM administrator, however, must consult the first Appendix in this manual, Configuring Product Governance & Compliance, which describes the PG&C-specific nodes in the Administrator module in Java Client. A compliance manager - that is, a PLM user who has been assigned the Compliance Manager role - may find the information in this appendix to be useful.

Some customers of PG&C may want to install the Microsoft Excel-based client, which uses predefined Excel templates to facilitate performing certain tasks. The second Appendix in this manual, Configuring the Excel Client, pertains to this installation.

1.4.2 PG&C Supplier Guide

A small manual, PG&C Supplier Guide, provides information for your supplier users to learn to work in the Web Client (and, if installed, the Microsoft Excel-based Client) to complete their end of your compliance process. The compliance manager should be familiar with the contents of this guide.

Supplier users can access the Agile Documentation web site to download the Supplier Guide; or, the compliance manager can send the PDF to supplier users as an email attachment.

1.4.3 Getting Started with Agile PLM

Every PLM user must be familiar with the contents of Getting Started with Agile PLM. Each chapter is a comprehensive introduction to Agile client interfaces (Web Client and Java Client), concepts and terms used in Agile PLM, and important cross-solution features.

Chapters 2, 4 and 5 of Getting Started with Agile PLM contain information that is prerequisite to the information in this manual. Even experienced Agile PLM users may find it useful to review Chapter 2, "Navigating Web Client".

This table lists Getting Started chapters (and one other Agile manual) that will help you master your tasks in Agile PG&C.

Feature or Concept	Documented in
It is recommended that you review the following chapters for general Agile PLM features and concepts before working with this PG&C User Guide:
Agile PLM Web Client user interface and navigation - the primary client for PG&C end users. You might read this chapter to gain understanding of the Agile PLM user interface.	Getting Started with Agile PLM, Chap. 2, "Navigating in Agile Web Client"
Introduction to Agile PLM concepts and terminology - essential if you have never used PLM.	Getting Started with Agile PLM, Chap. 4, "Concepts and Terms in Agile Solutions"
Introduction to Agile business objects, including creating & deleting objects, Actions, tabs, sharing, subscriptions, relationships, and references between objects.	Getting Started with Agile PLM, Chap. 5, "Working with Objects"
These chapters may be studied as you need to work with reports, searches, workflows and attachments:
Using reports to gather data	Getting Started with Agile PLM, Chap. 7, "Working with Agile Reports"
Searches	Getting Started with Agile PLM, Chap. 8, "Finding Agile Data with Searches"
Workflows	Getting Started with Agile PLM, Chap. 9, "Routing Objects with Workflows"
Attachments and file folders	Getting Started with Agile PLM, Chap. 10 & 11, "Working with Attachments" and "Working with File Folders."
When your work involves the Agile Import and Agile Export utilities:
Importing and exporting files and data	Agile PLM Import & Export Guide

1.5 New Features in PG&C for Release 9.3.3

Many new 9.3.3 features support the ability to collect, store, rollup, and report on REACH data, as described below and detailed throughout this guide:

Updated IPC forms and functionality - Importing substance data from IPC Version 2.0 schema is now supported. Customers reporting on REACH can now collect substance information from suppliers on parts and assemblies using new process extensions.
Specification management - Users who have the right privileges are able to run 'Add' or 'Replace' on any given specification for declarations under pending and unassigned status, for items under latest released rev and pending rev, and for all manufacturer part and part groups. All items, manufacturer parts and part groups assigned the new specification will be tagged for rollup.

External rollups - External rollups provide a method of storing weight and PPM of substances. Composition data is extracted from Agile PLM PG&C and externally rolled up weight data can be brought back and stored in Agile PLM. With 9.3.3, customers have the choice of using either the internal or external rollup engine to perform compliance rollup on specifications. Specifications are now identified as either internal or external.

Important:

In a clustered environment, PG&C External Rollup Task can be disabled on all except one node. Having the PG&C External Rollup task run on only one node will limit the impact of this task to users accessing other nodes in a cluster. To limit the nodes that can run PG&C Rollup, change externalrollup.skipServer to true in the agile.properties file on the cluster admin server. On one or more of the managed servers, alter the Weblogic App Server startup parameters by adding "-Dexternalrollup.skipServer=false". This JVM parameter will override the skip server setting read from the Admin server copy of agile.properties.

Two new reports - the Exemptions Report and the External Rollup Report - and new process extensions encompass the REACH enablement.
Acknowledge role - Reviewers assigned the Acknowledge privilege can acknowledge a declaration.
Acknowledge - A new workflow action requiring that users sign off that they reviewed a change. This is different from an approval signoff. The Acknowledge action typically would be used for suppliers who are not involved in approving a change, but need to review the change to make sure they react accordingly.

1.5.1 Updated IPC Forms and Functionality

In support of IPC version 2.0, IPC 1752A is now supported in Agile PLM. You can now create, import and export IPC 1752A subclasses based on either IPC 1752-1 or IPC 1752-2 declaration classes. Refer to the Declarations chapter for more information.

New IPC 2.0 XML Import and Export process extensions have been created, which are described in Importing and Exporting Declaration Data.

1.5.2 Specification Management

A user with certain privileges can now run 'Add' or 'Replace' processes on a specification. The user specifies which objects will be searched, and a task is created to run the search.

When the specification management task is complete, a log file contains details such as target and source specification (replace action), added specification (add action), number of records processed, processing status, and start and end times for the task.

Refer to the Specifications chapter for more information on these features.

1.5.3 External Rollup Functionality

External rollups provide a method of storing weight and PPM of substances. Composition data is extracted and rolled up weight data can be brought back in and stored. See Chapter 4, "Compositions for an in-depth discussion of compositions.

Specifications are now saved as either Internal or External, which is indicated on the cover page on a new attribute called "Rollup Engine". External specifications are rolled up using the external rollup functionality. Chapter 7, "Specifications, provides more details on external specifications.

IPC 1752A declarations have been introduced to support the revised IPC-1752 standard, which supports important enhancements such as the ability to declare multiple parts in a single declaration. Additionally, IPC-1752 has been revised to address the REACH Regulation and China RoHS. You can find more information in the Chapter 9, "Declarations" in Chapter 12, "External Compliance Rollups" and in Appendix D, "External Compliance Rollup Reference".

A new report has been created to represent these changes, External Rollup Report.

An Excel Rollup sample has also been provided to assist you in customizing rollup in Excel if you prefer a manual method. Details can be found in Appendix D, "External Compliance Rollup Reference".

1.5.3.1 Defining Approach to Compliance Management

Compliance rollups can be managed by logic built into the Agile PG&C application; we use the shorthand "internal engine" for this approach to compliance management. The internal engine determines compliance at the lowest level within the top level object (part or top level assembly) such that it compares the amount of a substance within each sub-object (part or subpart) against the weight/mass of that sub-object. The rollup is then the worst case scenario of the compliance statuses of the individual sub-objects.

Examples:

Compliance status of subparts rolls up to set compliance of a part.
Compliance status of parts rolls up to set compliance of top level assembly.

Alternatively, compliance rollups can be managed by customer-originating systems; we use the shorthand "external engine" for this approach to compliance management. The external engine determines compliance for the top level object (part or top level assembly) such that it rolls up the amount of a substance from all of the sub-objects in the top level object and compares it to the weight/mass of that entire top level object.

Examples:

Compliance status of a part is the total weight/mass of a substance in all the subparts compared to the weight/mass of the part.
Compliance status of a top level assembly is the total weight/mass of a substance in all the BOM parts compared to the weight/mass of the top level assembly.

1.5.4 Acknowledging Declarations

A user can be added as an acknowledger for declarations. The user with the Acknowledge role (includes the Acknowledge privilege) can acknowledge declarations. These terms are described below:

Acknowledge - A new workflow action called 'Acknowledge' is available for Review or Released status.

Acknowledger - A user or user group or job function can be an acknowledger if the Acknowledge privilege is assigned.

For more information about the Acknowledge feature, see the "Acknowledgments for Declarations" topic in Chapter 3, "RFI Process in PG&C" .

1.6 PG&C Use Cases

Below are general PG&C "use cases" and some use cases for the PLM administrator in PG&C. Each use case is cross-referenced to the corresponding section in the manual.

1.6.1 Use Cases for the PG&C User

Managing the RFI Process in PG&C - Levels of Due Diligence Using PG&C, Declaration Workflow and the RFI Process, Routing Declarations, and Completing the RFI Process;
Managing Substances - Creating Substances, Bill of Substances, and Mass Disclosures, Substance Aliasing, Mass Tolerance: Working with Substances;
Managing Substance Groups - Substance Groups and Conversion Factor;
Managing Specifications - Creating Specifications Adding and Replacing Specifications, and setting Exemptions, Thresholds, and Validation Type: Tabs and Attributes in Specifications;
Managing Part Groups - Creating Part Groups, Mapping Feature, Tabs and Attributes in Parts and Part Groups, and Conversion Factor in part groups: Part Groups > Parts Tab;
Managing Declarations - Types of Declarations, Creating Declarations, Tabs and Attributes in Declarations, Working with the Part Substances Tables;
PG&CSearches;
PG&CReports, including BOM Compliance Report;
Importing and ExportingData in PG&;
ValidatingCompliance - Rolling Up Compliance Data Using Internal Rollup, Rolling Up Compliance Data Using External Rollup, Compliance States, Composition Rollup on Bill of Substances, Compliance Rollup on BOM/Parts, and Substances and Weights Rollups using Excel Integration.

1.6.2 Use Cases for the Administrator

Here are a few use cases for PG&C configuration by the administrator. Remember that Appendix A contains a series of "checklists" that cover numerous areas of interest for the administrator, including the nodes in the Admin tree's PG&C node folder, as well as PG&C-specific Classes, Workflows, Users, and Suppliers.

Setting up Rollup Rules - Compliance Rollup Rule-Setting
Mapping Specifications to Parts > PageTwo (Items or Manufacturer Parts) - Specification Mapping
Managing Events in PG&C - Use Cases for Event Management in PG&C.