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86 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2018 Article by Roger L. Franz TE CONNECTIVITY Full material declaration of product content in electronics and other industries continues to be a challenge for both suppliers and custom- ers alike. For suppliers, managing substance- level data for all the materials in products is not usually a part of normal business operations; rather, it is an added burden and therefore cost to doing business. Customers, from mid- supply chain enterprises to OEMs, must have processes and systems to request, manage, and utilize the data to ensure compliance with worldwide substance regulations. These issues call out for easy-to-use software solution to aid reporting. The IPC-1752A Materials Declaration Management Standard, which is aligned with IPC-1751A Generic Requirements for Decla- ration Process Management, is widely used for environmental reporting today. The stan- dard specifies an XML (extensible markup language) schema for mandatory and required data, including support for Class D FMDs (full material declarations) for homogenous materi- als and substances required by the RoHS direc- tive (the full citation for the current "RoHS Recast" legislation is "Directive 2011/65/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2011 on the restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment"). In this paper, we focus on requirements for tools that enable rapid and accurate reporting of Class D FMDs that can be used by suppli- ers primarily in the base of the supply chain (e.g., raw materials and smaller components). We also provide examples of how this data can be used by the supplier's immediate customer to build more complex FMD data for product- level assemblies. Why Take the Road to FMD? One of the advantages of the FMD approach is that it is the only way a company can stay ahead of the ongoing addition of regulated substances. RoHS has been relatively static in