SecurityWorldMarket

20/11/2014

Euralarm calls for more efficient standardisation processes

Zug, Switzerland

Euralarm aims to ensure that the European fire safety and security industry fulfills its potential to contribute to European growth and employment and that it reaches its abilities to compete successfully in home and global markets. Standardisation is key to be able to reach these goals. To speed up and maximize efficiency of the standardisation process, Euralarm has written a Briefing on Market Driven Standardisation (MDS).

Euralarm members are already active in standardisation and spend many hours contributing to standards in the field of electronic fire and security and services. Practically all standards in these fields have been developed with an active and massive participation of experts of the members (and their members) of Euralarm. Being on top of the standardisation process, Euralarm members have good insight in the process itself and, according to the organisation, are not fully satisfied with the way the process has developed in the last years.

Establishing a functioning internal European market is of vital importance to Europe. This requires a comprehensive, coherent and effective standardisation framework. To avoid delay and eliminate multi-billion Euros of costs the current process needs to be updated and changed.

Instead of standards costing billions of Euros, the industry-based Technical Standards facilitate interoperability between countries and promote greater alliance of currently fragmented markets. This approach is in line with the ideas of the European Commission that calls for "an overall design for what the standardisation should look like” and wants to "instigate an end-user driven standardisation based on a careful identification of existing, national, European standardisation organisations”. Euralarm strongly agrees with these calls and wants to support them through their new Briefing. The paper not only criticises but also gives concrete proposals from experts involved in the day to day development of standards.

Euralarm believes that the standardisation evolution process as we know it now, could be dramatically improved through some simple measures. A more EU-centric approach of CEN/CENELEC standardisation is suggested in the Briefing. This would avoid unnecessary, time-consuming and costly duplication of work at a national level. This cost reduction would result in benefits for all stakeholders, from governments, through companies to the customers. To speed up and maximize efficiency of the standardisation process, Euralarm gives ten proposals in the Briefing on Market Driven Standardisation.

The new Briefing entitled, ‘Market Driven Standardization’ emphasises the importance of a faster, more efficient standardisation process. The current structure and the role of the National Committees are causing the European security industry to lose too much time and money on slow processes. With the proposals in this Briefing, the industry can quickly and easily speed up these processes, so it can adjust its standards to the rapidly changing fire safety and security industry and make them compatible across borders. All these proposals and more details can be found in the complete Briefing on the Euralarm website.



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