Design with Compliance in Mind: How to Build Compliance Into Your Product Development Process

A force that is completely outside of most organizations’ control is the changing legislative initiatives across the globe. Government bodies around the world often create or modify legislation that restrict the substances and materials that can be bought and sold in their region. Organizations often lack adequate contingency plans for this ever-changing regulatory environment. To address this problem, the product development process must be examined with a critical lens to assess where and how compliance can fit into processes that already exist.

Consider Compliance Early and Often

To facilitate this discussion, let’s look at a generic product development process where there are five main steps to bringing a product to market:

1)     Product ideation

2)     Product design

3)     Completion of simulation and prototyping

4)     Calculation of product compliance

5)     Manufacture and selling of product

At each stage of this process, the costs associated with a major change increase, as does the effort required to rectify a change. These changes are sometimes accounted for, as design is always an iterative process and critical examinations of each phase are important to making the best product. Often these examinations are focused on product performance. The essence of the product development process resides in making the best, most efficient product that you can within the limits of an engineering and design space.

There is a fundamental flaw with this approach: By the time compliance is considered, the design process is mostly complete. Changes that are necessary to solve any compliance problems discovered late in product development are expensive and time-consuming because they require revisiting extensively justified and verified design decisions. To solve this issue, we can look to design with compliance in mind by moving the fourth stage of the compliance assessment process across the first three and examine ways to future-proof this critical part of the process.

A workflow that brings compliance assessment upfront in the product design and development process saves time and money while providing future accountability.  

Weave the Digital Thread Through Product Design and Development

The ideation stage of product development is usually unconstrained with thoughts beyond what is possible for a product and what can be can be built based upon what already exists. In some cases, there is little-to-no framework for what is possible, and products are developed based on an idea or mindset inherent to the group.

We can begin to move compliance into this part of the design process by simply giving industrial and product designers the tools to understand their materials options, not only the aesthetics, color or feel, but also simple indicators as to their recyclability, compliance status or carbon footprint. Having these thoughts as part of the ideation process starts the product development process with the concept of compliance in mind, and lets other decisions carry these ideas forward.

An added benefit to adding materials intelligence to these workflows is that any tweaks or changes necessary to complete a product’s development can be informed by the same tools used by designers. The direct integration that exists between Granta and finite element analysis (FEA) tools enables material access to be restricted to only “Approved” ones, and bring the parameters necessary for analysis directly into their workspaces.

By democratizing compliance and considering it across the product development process, it’s easy to see how organizations can speed up and future-proof the important step of calculating product compliance.

For more information, download the Best Practices for Addressing the Restricted Substances Challenge and Ensuring Compliance white paper.