Conflict Minerals is the newest chemical substance based regulatory compliance requirement for companies who are required to perform an annual Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filing in the USA.   Starting in May 2014, companies must include in their SEC filing a statement confirming and declaring their compliance with the new "Conflict Minerals" regulation which requires that Gold, Tin, Tantalum, and Tungsten based chemical substances within products must not be sourced from the mines in or around the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Are you aware of this new regulatory requirement?   How is your company going to respond to this, and manage the plethora of information that must be collected from your supply chain, related to your Bill-of-Material, and be verifiable when the SEC requests an audit to back-up your declaration of compliance?

With the ENOVIA "Materials Compliance Central" (MCC) application, you can streamline this process, and simply add it to what you are already doing for ensuring and certifying your compliance with the RoHS, REACH, ELV, Prop 65, and other such chemical substance based regulatory compliance requirements in Europe, China, California, and many other global regions.    With the Out-of-the-Box compliance definition for Conflict Minerals, the MCC application will quickly and automatically identify which purchased components contain a Conflict Mineral based substance, which will rapidly identify which aspect of the supply chain will require certification that they are using a certified "Conflict Mineral Free" source for the Gold, Tin, Tantalum, or Tungsten based substance.

Upon receipt of the supplier's certification of being "Conflict Mineral Free", a Compliance Engineer can update the Material-Substance relationship on the supplier component within MCC such that the "Conflict Free Smelter" used by this particular supply chain segment is noted as an Exemption, as well as checking-in the supplier's electronic certificate.   This then provides the audit-able information needed to back-up your company's SEC declaration of being Conflict Mineral Compliant.

If you'd like more information on this, feel free to contact Mike Zepp (mike.zepp@3ds.com), or Kevin Baughey (kevin.baughey@3ds.com).