New Machinery Directive as of 2010

The Machinery Directive(MD) sets out safety requirements for new machines, assemblies of machines, interchangeable equipment and safety components, which must be met before these products can be traded within the European Economic Area. As of the 29th December 2009 the provisions of the new Machine Directive (2006/42/EC) will be applicable. This new Machine Directive includes some modifications to the essential health and safety requirements.

An important aspect within the Machine Directive is the product documentation.
Within the new Machine Directive the traceability of documentation becomes more important than ever. Manufacturers must keep the EC declaration of conformity and declaration of incorporation for a period of at least 10 years from the last date of manufacture. The focus will be on the whole lifecycle of products and its documentation, with special emphasis on operational health and safety issues.

Documentation specialists now face the challenge of creating documentation systems that stand the test of time. During the whole life cycle of a product the documentation has to be adjusted to changes in the product, the context in which it is used and changing perceptions on health and safety issues. Taking into account that all machinery must be accompanied by a translation of the instructions in the language of the country in which the machinery is to be used and by the instructions in the original language, you can imagine that this will lead to a very complex situation.

A structured documentation process in combination with the appropriate tools can help us solve these issues:

  1. Set up a linear process for the creation of all documentation products, involving all necessary steps from defining the goal, audience and context of the product and its documentation to the final pretest and translation of the documentation products.
  2. Set up processes for updating the documentation products, including the translations.
  3. Choose appropriate tools for the authoring process, taking into account that technical writers, illustrators, subject matter experts and translators have to work in a shared environment.
  4. Choose appropriate tools for the publishing process: depending on the product type and user group you will have different media. Electronic products typically feature on-line help in combination with a printed manual. In addition to these documentation types, instructions can be published on websites.

Please feel free to post you experiences with these kind of challenges!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Compliance to the Safety Machinery Directive is enforced by the law in order to protect both manufacturers and consumers. It assures that safety measures have been undertaken to provide high quality standard of production.
June 12, 2009 at 2:49 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using the Golden Circle Model in your resume and LinkedIn profile

Image
The last three years I worked as a (senior) business consultant and information architect at software company Be Informed in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. We worked on an amazing product, a ground breaking model-driven business process platform. And my job was to explain the possibilities of this platform to various audiences. The Be Free program, which I launched in September 2013 was a marketing campaign that targeted on making a wider group of people familiar with the product. The campaign was a great success and I had the feeling that I was really helping people in proving their ideas to their customers and managers. But the interaction was on-line and from a distance, never close enough to really understand their business goals and issues.  The sudden end of my contract with Be Informed, forced me to rethink my professional goals and ambitions. What do I really want? Do I want to be a product marketer, focused on 'pushing' a product? Or do I want to be a business cons
Read more

Improve Product and Brand engagement through smart documentation - A White Paper about the challenge of creating user-centric documentation

Image
For most product manufacturers, delivering adequate documentation is a constant challenge. The increasing complexity of products and the stricter regulations for product documentation often lead to extensive documentation sets with 500+ pages manuals on-line or in print. The question is: how effective is all this documentation? Smart, user-centric documentation Users can be overwhelmed by long, jargon-loaded user manuals, and frustrated by a lack of clear answers. When customers don’t find a solution, blame inevitably falls on the product and the company. Bad documentation - incomplete, unclear, out of date - creates a negative engagement with products and brands. Figure 1. Smarter documentation asks users what they need to know Smart documentation leads users to success and satisfaction. These are the users who share their positive experience with family and friends, and convince them to become customers in turn. Using semantic technology, we can create the smart document
Read more

Writing effective articles

Image
I am a writer. I have been all my life and I wouldn’t know what to do if I would ever lose this talent. I have been writing about many topics: from welding procedures and high tech greenhouse technology to  software implementations and the use of semantic technology.  Apart from the writing I enjoy digging into these topics and finding out how things really work and what the benefits are of these new technologies or approaches. But is a talent for writing in combination with an interesting topic enough to form the basis for a successful and effective article? Or do we need more? In this series of blog posts I will explore the criteria for a successful article, not necessarily providing you with a fix set of rules but rather focusing on best practices, lessons learned and examples from my own work. On the cover of a magazine One example from my own work. In 2008 I wrote an article called “The Flexible Intranet” about using semantic technology to create smarter Intranet sites. Ho
Read more