For contract manufacturers across Europe, 2006 will be regarded as a very challenging year. During 2006, these companies had to ensure that their manufacturing procedures complied with the RoHS lead-free regulations. The RoHS regulations have been created to safeguard the environment from the considerable amount of lead found in waste electronics products and has meant that the entire electronics industry has had to undergo a massive change, removing lead from the majority of electronic components and assemblies.

One such company undertaking this transition has been contract electronics manufacturer Barric.
"It's been a very tough year, there is no point in pretending otherwise," said Mike Bayley, Director of Business Development. "We've been manufacturing electronics for over 20 years and were in better shape than most to absorb the impact of RoHS, but many aspects of the change to lead-free were beyond our control."

Barric found that a major problem was that of component supply. Very often an entire shipment of electronic assemblies would be held up for a single lead-free part that was subject to an extended delivery time. Although Barric had worked closely with all of their clients on the transition to lead-free manufacture, being unable to ship product was enormously frustrating for both parties and also put considerable pressure on the company's cash flow and profitability.

An unexpected dilemma was also that many traditional lead based components suddenly became 'end of life' even before the RoHS deadline, as manufacturers wanted to exhaust their stock. This meant that even products that were exempt from the RoHS regulations were impacted by the change.

"We have some key projects, that although exempt, we have had to invest a lot of energy with our clients to find a way forward, simply because the components we need are no longer available," said Mike Bayley.

In terms of the actual manufacturing of RoHS compliant electronics, Barric have come to regard this as the easy part of the process. The main change has been in the investment of a new oven that can deliver seven temperature zones. The new lead-free components require a higher temperature due to the new material that has replaced lead. The real challenge is that chips such as BGA's are at risk of damage at such high temperatures, as is the PCB itself. The new oven provides very sophisticated temperature control to ensure good solder flow without risk to components. In addition to this, Barric also invested in a state of the art thermal profiling tool and predictive thermal profiling software to ensure they were able to meet the exacting requirements for manufacturing the new lead-free components.

"In terms of the manufacturing, we have had very few problems. There has been a lot of technical support available to help us understand the issues and the new technology," said Mike Bayley. "This side of things has run very smoothly."

Barric claim that after the major issue of sourcing critical components, the next biggest challenge was simply the logistics of managing the transition from lead to lead-free. Barric had to duplicate their goods inwards systems, to accommodate both lead and lead-free components, ensuring that each were kept separate and were easily identifiable.

"We've had to introduce new part codes, a colour label scheme and even separate areas in the factory to ensure that the lead and lead-free manufacturing were able to run side by side," said Mike Bayley. "Fortunately, because we are accredited by BSI with BS EN ISO9001:2000, we were equipped and understood the nature of 'traceability', so were able to adopt this aspect of RoHS without making too many changes to our booking-in and administration systems."

Barric's experience was that most of their challenges were away from the factory floor. Indeed, one of the biggest challenges was informing their clients of the new regulations and helping to bring about the necessary design changes. Barric management were surprised how few of their clients understood the RoHS regulations and at an early stage the Barric team put together an informative and detailed newsletter to send out to each clients. This went a long way to help Barric prepare with their clients for the changes they would be making.

A year on and Barric feel that they are now over the worst and are hoping for smoother 2007.

"Significant credit for our success during 2006 is due to the efforts of our Purchasing Manager, Paul Jay," said Mike. "He has spent many hours over the year scouring the world for components so that we can meet our clients deliveries, without a doubt, this has been key to our success with the RoHS side of things this year."