Machinery Safety 101

Regular read­ers will be aware of the con­tro­versy that has sur­rounded the manda­tory imple­men­ta­tion of EN ISO 13849–1:2006, orig­i­nally sched­uled for 28-​​Dec-​​09. The EC Machinery Working Group met this week to review the opin­ions of European machin­ery experts. Following the meet­ing, it was announced that the manda­tory imple­men­ta­tion date will be extended by some time, how­ever no date was given.

Some spec­u­la­tion exists about the length of the exten­sion, with some sources say­ing that it could be as lit­tle as 12 months to as long as five years. Until the EC revises the dates and pub­lishes them in the Official Journal we won’t have the ‘final word’, how­ever we are hop­ing that an announce­ment will be made to clar­ify the deci­sion and the date.

If you are a machine builder who has already imple­mented EN ISO 13849–1:2006 and the val­i­da­tion stan­dard EN ISO 13849–2:2006, you are ahead of the game. Your efforts have not been wasted, as your sys­tems already con­form to the require­ments that will even­tu­ally be manda­tory for all machine builders. For those machine builders who have yet to imple­ment these stan­dards, you’ve gained a bit of a reprieve, but you will still be required to imple­ment these stan­dards even­tu­ally. If you have yet to begin imple­men­ta­tion, now is the time.

I will post the new manda­tory imple­men­ta­tion dates as soon as this infor­ma­tion is available.

+DougNix is Managing Director and Principal Consultant at Compliance InSight Consulting, Inc. (http://​www​.com​pli​an​cein​sight​.ca) in Kitchener, Ontario, and is Lead Author and Managing Editor of the Machinery Safety 101 blog.

Doug’s work includes teach­ing machin­ery risk assess­ment tech­niques pri­vately and through Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Kitchener, Ontario, as well as pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal ser­vices and train­ing pro­grams to clients related to risk assess­ment, indus­trial machin­ery safety, safety-​​related con­trol sys­tem inte­gra­tion and reli­a­bil­ity, laser safety and reg­u­la­tory conformity.

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