2017 was a very busy year for the consortium regarding better management, dossier updates and streamlining the consortium’s finances to align with it's agreement especially in relation to  reimbursement.

The MAIN achievements in 2017 were as follows:

·       General Assembly: 2017 marked the highest attendance at the General Assembly meeting since the birth of the consortium.  With several pertinent issues discussed in relation to the Consortium’s workplan, Finances and By-laws. This year saw the highest number of voting action points.  These voting points led to changes in the by-laws, better financial management and reporting.

·       New Governance: The change of governance took effect in Q2 with a new Chairman, two new Vice-chars and a new Secretary General. The new government was put in place to address the ever-complex issues relating to compliance check, reimbursement of members and SIEF as well as compliance with the data-sharing regulation. To this end, the incoming Chairman’s vision to include the SMART criteria into the running of the consortium was put in place. In his own words, the consortium’s activities and yearly goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely with an improved system of reporting established in the form of a monthly report to the Steering Committee and a quarterly report to the General Assembly to keep all members abreast with the Consortiums activities including its achievements and bottlenecks. He also, insisted on the use of MARA's website as a portal to keep SIEF's updated with REACH related updates on Mn substances and communications between ECHA and the lead registrants.

·       Reimbursement: For the first time since the birth of the consortium, the consortium entered a wing of reimbursing its members and the SIEF as stipulated in its agreement after completing the development of a validated reimbursement model and obtaining approval from the GA. 2018 will see an increase in this tasks as the total number of registrants will become clearer after the May deadline.

·       Dossier updates: 2017 saw the highest dossier updates since the 2010 registration deadline. These updates were triggered by ECHA’s demands for new studies or they were spontaneous based on new available data. The dossiers updated were: Mn3O4, SiMn slag, FeMn slag, MnCO3, and Mn(NO3)2.

·       LoA Fees and top-up fees: The highest number of LoA was sold this year since 2010 with over 95% of LoA top-up fees collected from SIEF for the substance MnO2. Top-up fees for the other substances will be initiated/collected after the 2018 registration deadline when the total number of participants per substance/registrations and the total expenses from the compliance checks will be clearer.

The consortium saw other achievements during this year but the above mentioned 5 are considered noteworthy with by far the highest impact in terms of consortium managment, workload and or financial impact.