Integrated recovery management solution aimed at ensuring compliance with WEEE and RoHS environmental regulations
Fremont, CA — May 2, 2005 — WCTbid, a provider of hosted, lifecycle inventory asset management solutions, today announced a new product recovery management (PRM) portal.
Dubbed WEEEcycle.com, the PRM portal handles mandated recycling requirements from collection request to final disposition to compliance reporting. WCTbid said WEEEcycle.com combines Web-based network management workflow and control, a compliance data repository, and a network of pre-qualified service providers in order to provide a recovery, remarketing and recycling network.
This August 15, the European Union's WEEE initiative, which regulates all electronic goods made or sold into the EU, goes into effect. Under the plan, the EU will hold manufacturers ultimately accountable for recovering and recycling products. The massive initiative will impact most multi-national companies engaged in manufacturing and is expected to create considerable inventory issues. Companies without an action plan will likely end up directing significant unbudgeted sums to national collective take-back programs. Non-compliance will mean penalties or lost sales.
Many multi-national companies are already planning to implement IT systems with auditing and reporting tools to manage global compliance processes, stated WCTbid. They are doing so to maintain worldwide process standardization but also in anticipation of growing regional legislation in the United States. Already a handful of states, including Maine, Massachusetts and California, have mimicked the EU's eWaste directives and have begun restricting or charging fees for electronic waste dumping.
WCTbid's WEEEcycle.com portal was developed to support both the EU and growing U.S.-based eWaste compliance requirements. WCTbid's new PRM portal consists of four technology and service components:
* An information portal for customers, sales channel partners and recycling service providers that provides content ranging from customer-oriented recycling how-tos to mandatory information dissemination such as product disassembly instructions.
* A hosted network management solution that initiates, monitors and controls activity throughout the recovery cycle, including collection request, pick-up and delivery material monitoring, and tracking across the full range of product disposition options. The PRM portal also generates compliance reporting.
* Predefined solution partners have been established to handle transportation management, disassembly or other special services, such as certified recycling and network management, and can provide complete network coverage throughout the EU and North America.
* Integrated whole product or component remarketing and resale services through the WCTbid.com asset liquidation platform provides a revenue component to ensure that recovery programs are cost-effective or profitable.
To help companies with recovery program definition, WCTbid said it is also offering a series of workshops titled, Unraveling WEEE, to help all company stakeholders understand the regulations, map their products and processes to a set of recovery chain alternatives, and drive consensus to the optimum solution that meets cost, compliance and customer-focused objectives.
Whether the groundswell to green is regulation or market-driven, supply chain management is increasingly becoming a cradle-to-grave endeavor, according to Shoshanah Cohen, director in management consultancy for global supply chain practice at PRTM — a management consultant firm in Costa Mesa, Calif. Organizations have long recognized the importance of including reverse logistics processes within the context of their overall supply chain. Now we're seeing an expansion to the scope of the service supply chain to include product recovery management as well.
Kevin Canty, vice president of Operations at Peribit Networks, which provides solutions for wide-area networks (WANs), said, Showing environmental leadership, meeting regulatory compliance and maintaining the right cost structure are all key objectives for us. Since these may be conflicting objectives, we are happy to see companies like WCTbid that can help us implement programs with the right balance.
For more information on the supply chain impact of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) regulations, see these SDCExec.com articles.
