Implementing product-related hazardous substances management through a reporting-oriented project management approach

The number of product-related environmental regulations has been dramatically increasing over the last few years. This is especially true for the number of laws concerning restrictions of hazardous substances (e.g. REACh or RoHS). A lot of companies have decided to implement a management system to cope with the challenges of hazardous substances in their products. Nearly all companies lack the competencies required to manage hazardous substance reporting and therefore hire external consultants in order to implement and improve their reporting processes. While the external consultants do possess a sound technical knowledge concerning the hazardous substance management, the major drawback to this solution is that they do not have the requisite knowledge of the internal processes, tools and data. Therefore external consultants do need, on average, about several weeks until they understand the internal processes and the organization, allowing the reporting to be of a higher standard. Because of this issue, a reporting-oriented approach is described within this article. Within this approach the external consultant defines the content of several milestones with an interdisciplinary project team. After that he will only join the milestones meeting with the upper management. This article gives an overview of the different milestones and the content of these milestones.