The protection of the environment is becoming more and more very important within Western Europe and the companies have to fulfill a lot of regulations and requirements to guarantee that the products they deliver to the customers are free of toxic or harmfull substances. While central databases to collect all substances of a product are accepted within the automotive area, other branches do not really want to deliver all - partly secret - information of their product to avoid spying.
To automate such a scenario to collect product material information the concept of the digital object memory has been developed. During the production process the information will be collected and stored in the product specific database as a parts list information. Via QR codes or RFID Chips the information can be stored in a cloud database, eg. in the datacross public cloud or in the product memory chip itself.
A mobile App for end-user has been developed to retrieve all relevant information about the compliance of a specific product. So the end-user can be informed directly on demand without any time consuming communication with the company producing the product. With this concept tec4U will be prepared to deliver product material information via mobile App to the public if the demand for it will grow.
Business Need: The protection of the environment is becoming more and more very important within Western Europe and the companies have to fulfill a lot of regulations and requirements to guarantee that the products they deliver to the customers are free of toxic or harmfull substances. While central databases to collect all substances of a product are accepted within the automotive area, other branches do not really want to deliver all - partly secret - information of their product to avoid spying.
To automate such a scenario to collect product material information the concept of the digital object memory has been developed. During the production process the information will be collected and stored in the product specific database as a parts list information. Via QR codes or RFID Chips the information can be stored in a cloud database, eg. in the datacross public cloud or in the product memory chip itself.
A mobile App for end-user has been developed to retrieve all relevant information about the compliance of a specific product. So the end-user can be informed directly on demand without any time consuming communication with the company producing the product. With this concept tec4U will be prepared to deliver product material information via mobile App to the public if the demand for it will grow.
Solution: For the production of goods, the industry often has to make usage of raw material that can be harmful to people in substantial quantities. To avoid damage to living organisms and to the environment, the European Union adopted the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive 2011/65/EU (RoHS). It set permissable limits for certain substances which must not be exceeded in homogeneous materials. According to the EU regulation No. 1907/2006 (REACH), processing companies are also subject to information obligations concerning harmful materials. With exception to the automotive industry, there are currently hardly any central solutions in form of material databases to automatically exchange substance data between companies via standardized interfaces. That means that especially companies with many intermediate products have enormous administrative expenses in order to meet the statutory regulations (Material Compliance).
The project SiCoCheC wants to address this problem by creating a material database on the basis of cloud computing. In this database, there is recorded information about contained hazardous substances and their danger for individual intermediate and end products which companies and consumers can retrieve. During production, the products’s substances are saved in digital product memories and are stored in the material database afterwards. If companies do not want to permanently store their sensitive data in form of parts lists in the data cloud, an explicit approval process can be established. Automated data exchange can support most of REACH’s administrative expense through information systems. To assure the quality of the reported substance data, there are processes for a plausibility check as well as credibility analyses of the reporting company. If there are reasonable doubts or if needed otherwise, companies can order laboratory analyses at connected laboratories and the inspection documents can be stored in SiCoCheC in a revision-proof manner afterwards. Consumers can easily retrieve the products’s substances with the help of identification features such as barcodes or serial numbers. With this simple way of retrieving, SiCoCheC supports the vision of life without toxic substances.
Results: The project SiCoCheC created a big scenario about the future process of Material compliance assessment taking into account that there are a lot of different stakeholders to be involved in this process during specific phases of product development, production and sales.
The project results are starting points for future Industry 4.0 process realizations based on the big scenario consisting of the production process chain including the inventory of material data, the transfer of material information of a product during the manufacturing of a product until the use of the product within a specific context.
The final Smartphone App demonstrates the future use as a public information system based on the technology of digital object memories which can be retrieved near to the product either by RFID technology, smart labels or QR codes and which is suitable to address the end-users need, e.g. presenting the certification Label and explaining the certification rules if required. The detailed public product information can be retrieved but the secret product material components are not available for the public.
The App can be used as well to present additional information about the product e.g. how to use the product effectively and in which case it is not allowed to use the product. The business case e.g. within the Retail scenario has two impacts for different stakeholders: For the product owner the advantages of the product are presented and the Material compliance is only one aspect. For the end-user the fact that the product can be used without real concerns and may be further information about a use case beside the planned use.
The project presented interfaces to other process partners that have to be involved within a specific phase of a compliances check, e.g. a chemistry lab can check the product about forbidden substances if the risk has to be proven high although the supplier has generally declared that all articles are compliant. The App can be used in future scenarios as a first step to communicate with the customer to enhance the customer satisfaction.