Navigating NATO and Dual-use Regulations with PLM

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been working to accelerate the development of new technologies for both commercial and military applications. These “dual-use” technologies face a complex, fast-growing web of regulations that govern how they’re built and shared. 

Ensuring compliance with dual-use regulations can be a major challenge, especially for companies that have focused only on defense or commercial applications in the past. Failure to comply can result in steep penalties, which creates pressure to get dual-use compliance right.

The solution is product lifecycle management (PLM), an approach that ensures full supply chain traceability and compliance at every stage of the product lifecycle. In this guide, we explain how your company can navigate NATO and dual-use regulations with PLM.

Short on Time? Here’s a Brief Overview

• Dual-use regulations impact products with both commercial and military applications. They include end-to-end supply chain traceability, limitations on technology export, and requirements in data security.

• Existing compliance systems often struggle to keep up with evolving dual-use regulations. They may involve manual processes or lack strong security measures.

• PLM supports compliance by centralizing data management, enabling end-to-end traceability, automating compliance workflows, and ensuring data is secure.

• Your business can implement PLM by assessing your current compliance challenges, choosing a PLM solution, partnering with a PLM expert, and training your team to use PLM effectively.

NATO and Dual-Use Regulations Explained

Dual-use technologies face conflicting demands because of their dual commercial and military applications. They must be commercially successful but, at the same time, face strict export controls to prevent their spread to adversary nations. In addition, production must be affordable but rely only on domestic or friendly-nation supply chains to ensure continued production during times of conflict or war. And finally, companies building these products must weather cyberattacks, espionage, and sabotage from countries looking to gain a technological edge or thwart the NATO alliance.

These challenges have led to the emergence of a complex, stringent set of regulations governing dual-use technologies, especially in the aerospace and defense manufacturing industries. Some of the biggest compliance challenges that companies building dual-use technologies face include: 

• Requirements for 100% supply chain traceability
• Limitations on technology sales and export
• Requirements around data security and confidentiality

Due to these products’ defense impacts, financial penalties for non-compliance are steep. Companies that fail to maintain compliance also risk severe reputational damage and could lose valuable defense contracts.

The Challenges of Manual and Legacy Compliance

Currently, the systems and processes that many companies rely on for compliance aren’t suitable for use with more complex dual-use regulations. All too often, companies built legacy systems over decades in an ad hoc manner that involves inefficient manual workflows. They simply can’t keep up with the pace of change in today’s defense technology and regulatory landscape.

Furthermore, existing systems don’t automate adherence to changing export controls or track compliance across multiple product lifecycles and teams. Data silos can also make it difficult to achieve full supply chain traceability and can lead to reporting delays that incur costly penalties.

Importantly, outdated systems are less secure and can expose your company’s technology to hostile adversaries.

Companies need a new approach to ensure compliance with dual-use regulations. This is where PLM can help.

How PLM Can Simplify NATO and Dual-Use Compliance

PLM is a technological approach to manufacturing that helps companies manage all aspects of a product, from design and production to marketing and sales. It offers four key benefits that can dramatically simplify compliance with NATO and dual-use regulations.

Centralized data management
PLM centralizes data about a product, including details about the supply chain for key components, production and quality metrics, distribution, and more. That enables compliance officers to use your PLM system as a single source of truth for regulatory documentation. It also reduces the time needed for compliance and ensures that all data is current.

In addition, as regulations change, compliance officers can update your PLM so that supply chain and production managers are fully aware of the new requirements. It makes it easier to keep up with the rapid evolution of dual-use regulations.

End-to-end traceability
PLM plays a key role in keeping your supply chains fully traceable. You can track components from source to finished product and record detailed information to limit the scope and cost of a recall.

PLM also lets you capture data about your production processes, including critical quality metrics. You can use this data to quickly spot potential compliance issues or adjust processes to enhance product quality.

Workflow automation
Another benefit of PLM systems is that they offer complex workflow automations that save time and reduce human error.

For example, you can automatically check distribution lists against export restrictions to prevent products with controlled components from being shipped to blocked entities. You can also generate regulatory reports automatically, freeing up your team to focus on other aspects of compliance.

Secure collaboration
PLM systems help secure sensitive data while facilitating collaboration among stakeholders both inside and outside your business. You can customize permissions at a granular level to control who can view and share specific information.

In addition, PLM systems offer audit logs and alerts that help you monitor who is accessing information in real time. This is a key feature for preventing data theft and identifying potential vulnerabilities.

Steps to Implement PLM for Compliance

Here’s how your business can implement PLM to streamline compliance with dual-use regulations.

Step 1: Assess compliance challenges
Begin by assessing the compliance challenges your business currently faces. The goal is to identify where your existing compliance processes fall short and how PLM can help. This assessment should involve compliance officers as well as operations and supply chain managers who may have additional insights into how your processes fall short or could be optimized.

For your initial implementation, focus on one or two key shortcomings that PLM could quickly solve. Starting with simple tasks is proof of concept and can provide momentum for tackling more complex compliance challenges.

Step 2: Select a PLM platform
Choose a PLM platform with tools to help your business address the challenges you identified in your assessment. At CLEVR, we use Siemens Teamcenter for compliance because it provides robust support for collaboration, streamlined process templates, and integrated quality management tools. 

For more options, check out our full guide to the top PLM solutions.

Step 3: Partner with experts
Partnering with experienced PLM specialists can simplify your implementation process and make sure your PLM system is customized to your business’s specific needs. A partner like CLEVR can help your business use PLM to its full potential and lay the groundwork for scaling your system in the future.

Step 4: Train your teams
Finally, train your teams on PLM so they know how to use your new system. Training can empower employees to use PLM to proactively solve compliance challenges and boost collaboration among your design, production, supply chain, and compliance teams.

How CLEVR Can Help You Simplify Compliance

CLEVR is here to serve as an expert partner and help you streamline compliance with PLM. We have deep experience building custom PLM solutions for businesses across the highly regulated manufacturing, marine, and energy and utilities industries. Our solutions are secure, efficient, and scalable to prepare your business for the future.

Check out our comprehensive guide to PLM to learn more about CLEVR’s tailored PLM solutions.

How We Researched This Guide

This guide draws on research on NATO and dual-use regulations and best practices for compliance. It’s also based on our own experience using PLM software for compliance in heavily regulated industries.

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