August 28, 2014

Cambridge, UK – August, 2014. In this month’s Eureka magazine, Justin Cunningham looks at how the management of materials data has become vital for engineering businesses. He suggests that one of the main reasons for this is the growing number of regulatory and environmental commitments that specify the declaration and often complete omission of some materials and substances.

The article reports on a recent EMIT seminar hosted by the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, where Boeing highlighted its efforts to capture and record materials data to accelerate its reaction to regulatory restriction on the materials and substances it may use. Peter Mezey, information technology and services manager at Boeing, explained that “When you start to drill down and go to suppliers—and the suppliers to those suppliers—you end up with a lot of information that you need to verify and essentially audit… The amount of time we have to be compliant is getting shorter, while the number of new regulations coming through is only going to increase. So this is a real business risk that could really have an impact if we are not able to act quickly enough.” 

This risk, Justin Cunningham reports, has seen Granta play an increasing role in helping large OEMs manage material data in relation to environmental regulatory pressure. He concludes that good materials information management is key: “once the materials information and data is in place, it allows companies to react much more quickly to new regulation so to understand the risk earlier, so engineers can find alternatives or workarounds. It’s especially advantageous in the early stages of the design process where it’s most cost effective to find alternatives.

 

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