Ok, here is yet another potentially contentious view: It seems interesting that this discussion should come on the heels of the recent threads discussing the fundamental nature of compliance and confidence building.
In the discussion about adequacy of manufacturer statements of compliance, a few main points came to light - some folks did not feel that this "assertion" was credible, without being supported by some more substantial evidence of compliance. In the same sense, a OM would be asking inspectors, customs officials and certification organizations to accept the test results and factory inspection of another organization, without seeing any sort of test report or inspection report. This would require a leap of faith that manufacturers responding to the earlier survey were unwilling to make, with respect to obtaining components without independent evaluation. A second relevant point is that, even with the adoption of harmonized standards, many national deviations reflect different notions of safety. What standards writing organizations and testing bodies may consider to be safe in country X, could be considered quite dangerous in country Y. This discrepancy could arise as a result of a number of issues - however this leads to the idea that an OM would have encompass the worst case scenario. Then manufacturers would be forced to comply with the notions of safety in more than 200 countries, regardless of the actual intended markets for the product. Don't forget that many standards (and national deviations to international standards) also address specific national issues such as plugs, language requirements, etc. So, assuming that acceptance authorities would be willing to accept the results of tests from all corners of the globe (an OM wouldn't be useful unless testing was accessible on a local level), and would be willing to accept the results of testing without having necessarily established confidence in the test labs, we can have one a few possible outcomes: 1) Countries and certification organizations "harmonizing down" to the lowest common denominator of safety, in order to provide a common base requirement - a pillar of the one standard, one test, one mark concept. This can be much more easily accomplished by eliminating product requirements altogether, or 2) Utilizing 200! (200*199*198...3*2*1) variants of the OM Mark to allow manufacturers to design and comply with the requirements in their specific countries of interest, or 3) Manufacturers would be faced with complying with the worst-case scenario, regardless of applicability. This would mean that all national requirements would be mandatory, regardless of applicability. This could include requiring the warning labels to be in all possible user-languages (at least a thousand languages or more) and have the ability to be used with all possible voltage ranges, plugs, etc. In conclusion the present system may be less that satisfactory -- however, we are a very long way from an OM. Much like world peace, it is a laudable goal which I don't expect to see completed in my lifetime. Have a lovely weekend! ---------------------------------------------------------------- Get your free email from AltaVista at http://altavista.iname.com --------- This message is coming from the emc-pstc discussion list. To cancel your subscription, send mail to majord...@ieee.com with the single line: "unsubscribe emc-pstc" (without the quotes). For help, send mail to ed.pr...@cubic.com, ri...@sdd.hp.com, or roger.volgst...@compaq.co (the list administrators).
