1 Introduction to Agile PG&C

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
Europe: 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.

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, , provides information for you to learn to work in Agile Web Client and to complete your end of the compliance process.Agile PG&C Supplier Guide

A supplier in the PG&C solution is a company that provides compliance information about parts that are used in a buyer company's manufacturing process. The Agile administrator at the buyer company has created Agile users, which have been called "contact users" and are now referred to as "declaration recipients" in the PG&C framework.

The compliance manager at the buyer company creates declarations that are sent to the supplier's declaration recipients. In turn, declaration recipients complete declaration requests from the buyer.

1.4.1 PG&C User Guide

The Agile PG&C User Guide is the manual for working in the PG&C solution on the Buyer side. It describes the PG&C-specific business classes in depth, as well as compliance rollups and other features. In some cases, the manager of Agile-based compliance work at your firm might find value referring to the User Guide.