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Motorola

Motorola uses EMARS to manage environmental compliance.

Company Description

Motorola is a $37 billion communications company providing end-to-end seamless mobility products. Motorola's four operating business segments include Mobile Devices Segment; Government and Enterprise Mobility Solutions Segment; Networks Segment, and Connected Home Solutions Segment.

Business Challenge

Motorola's global and diverse customer base means that its products must comply with multiple environmental standards, including EU RoHS for electronics and ELV for the automotive industry. Motorola must manage and track the material content and environmental compliance status of hundreds of products which are designed and manufactured worldwide. These products consist of hundreds of thousands of supplier parts purchased from thousands of suppliers.

With hundreds of products, hundreds of thousands of supplier parts, and multiple environmental standards, managing environmental compliance was becoming an increasingly complex, time consuming, and costly task for Motorola. Engineers found themselves manually aggregating the material content data collected from suppliers in Excel spreadsheets – a process that could take four weeks per product. Manually accounting for the content differences of multi-sourced supplier parts made the task even more difficult.

Synapsis Project

After evaluating several alternative tools and approaches, Motorola selected EMARS. Synapsis implemented EMARS, integrating it with Motorola’s vast item mastering and diverse PLM and ERP systems located throughout the world. Synapsis worked with Motorola’s different business units to develop a consistent approach to environmental compliance management, enabled by the functionality of EMARS and the data provided by EMARS.

Impact

EMARS reduced the time required for Motorola to analyze, aggregate, and report the environmental compliance status of any given product. A process that had taken weeks per product, now takes minutes. EMARS also plays a central role in automating the collection and validation of all supplier part data, helping Motorola ensure data accuracy. The average qualification cycle time associated with a new supplier part has been reduced from 28 days to 3 days.

EMARS is fully integrated with Motorola’s item master, PLM, ERP, CAD, and other systems, enabling compliance status reporting based on the product’s true BOM, not a manually assembled spreadsheet. Further, a product’s compliance status is now visible throughout the organization, at the earliest stages of a product’s development. This enables Motorola to incorporate compliance checks at various gates in the product development process. This helps Motorola ensure that its products are designed to be green from the outset, avoiding costly after-the-fact redesigns.

EMARS enables Motorola to produce detailed BOM reports providing traceable evidence that its products meet compliance standards. Motorola has satisfied environmental audits performed by customers representing upwards of 60% of its revenue.

EMARS, an intuitive, web-based tool, is actively used by 2,700 Motorola employees worldwide and plays a crucial role in Motorola’s ongoing efforts to bring environmentally friendly products to market.

Related Links

• Read Green SupplyLine on Motorola's use of EMARS »
• Learn more about EMARS »
• Request EMARS demo or more information »