-- By Jason Malcore, AEM Senior Director of Safety & Product Leadership
Over the last 25 years, the global regulatory landscape has continued to expand and grow more complex with each passing year. This has led to larger administrative burdens, costly product re-designs, higher barriers to trade, and more uncertainty for industry as they look to navigate the future business environment.
There are a variety of different factors that are driving this change:
- New global players
- An evolving regulatory focus
- Data collection needs
- Supply chain obstacles
- Unharmonized rules
The responsibility to understand and deal with these factors rests squarely on the shoulders of our industry. Moreover, identifying well-conceived strategies and adopting useful tactics to navigate what lies ahead because of the impacts of these factors is of critical importance. With that said, let’s take a closer look at each and examine their potential effects on manufacturers:
New Global Players
The developed economies of the world continue to write new rules and regulations that impact our products and risk our industry’s market access. While these new rules certainly create more work and compliance related stress for manufacturers, the long-term concern for industry is starting to come from the developing world (especially as it starts to follow suite and introduce copycat requirements of their own). South America, Australia, the Gulf States, and India, among others, are all introducing new regulations and compliance schemes for off-road equipment, resulting in an explosion of new requirements. This trend will likely continue, as more and more countries move to control their own importation and safety requirements, as opposed to relying on the developed world’s standards.
AEM’s Safety & Product Leadership Department helps its members grow and maintain market access through safety, sustainability, and shared solutions. Learn more.
An Evolving Regulatory Focus
As the regulatory environment continues to expand into new markets, policymakers are beginning to explore new concepts of risk mitigation, such as climate and sustainability issues. The older style of regulations in the 20th century tended to focus on addressing the immediate safety risks associated with the machine and the worksite, such as worker safety requirements, engine emissions restrictions, and noise emission limits. In each case, the rule focused on addressing the acute hazards associated with the use and function of equipment on a jobsite. Over the last 25 years, however, rules have started to focus more and more on long-term chronic issues, such as recyclability, climate change, and chemical hazards. The question has turned from how a product affects people and the environment today, to how a product will affect people and the environment over its entire lifespan. This new focus from policymakers has resulted in a variety of new rules that are more complicated and expensive from a compliance standpoint.
Data Collection Needs
One of the primary aftereffects of complying with these new types of rules is the need to collect, manage, and analyze large amounts of data from your supply chain. Rules focusing on chemicals, embedded carbon, forced labor, deforestation, or conflict minerals all require the collection of data on the origin, content, and processes used on the parts purchased from your supply chain. Historically, manufacturers specify components based solely on performance and safety characteristics. This means OEMs will need to adapt to a new legal environment that requires the collection of large amounts of data, as well as the skills necessary to interpret that data and answer the policy questions at the heart of these new rules.
Supply Chain Obstacles
While the data requirements of this new regulatory environment may be clear, the process of collecting this data will be incredibly challenging. The off-road equipment industry has a supply chain that is more than 20 layers deep, with products that contain more than 100,000 parts from tens of thousands of unique suppliers. Many components are manufactured by small companies that do not have the resources or expertise to answer these types of questions, nor do they fully understand the rules themselves. In some cases, international suppliers, who are not the regulated party under these rules, will have little incentive to provide this information to downstream customers that are not purchasing in large enough quantities. In other cases, certain manufacturers, looking to protect their product intellectual property, may refuse to disclose this type of information for fear of losing market share. In any case, the challenge for our industry will be to raise awareness of these new rules, explain why they are important to our industry, and educate our supply chain on how to comply with our requests.
Unharmonized Rules
The final, and perhaps most important change we are seeing, based on the growth of both old and new regulations around the world, is the disharmony of the global compliance environment. Certain regulatory initiatives, such as Tier 4 engine emissions or the Montreal Protocol for ozone depleting substance (ODS), created a uniform global standard to mitigate certain environmental risks. Harmonized rules simplify administrative burdens, eliminate the need for additional product lines based solely on regulatory requirements, and lessen the competitive disadvantages certain policies create between different political jurisdictions. With the explosion of new rules, new players, and new regulatory concepts, the likelihood of facing an increasingly disjointed global market grows by the day. For all these reasons, it is vitally important for industry stakeholders to engage with both political and administrative policymakers to advocate and educate these individuals on the nuances and needs of our industry.
