Euralarm is setting up a stakeholder group to help push through European Services Standard prEN 16763.
The association of European manufacturers, installers and service providers is urging accredited certification bodies, insurance companies, first responders, consumer organisations and others “with a genuine interest in enhancing service level quality on a European scale” to get involved
Establishing clear service quality levels for electronic fire safety and security systems the standard would be a European first. Euralarm initiated discussions in 2011 and the prEN 16763 is now in the enquiry phase after lengthy discussions in the CEN/CENELEC project group TC4.
Euralarm believes the standard stands a strong chance of being adopted.
The standard defines basic levels of competence for employees entrusted with the planning, design, assembly, commissioning, system verification, handover or maintenance of fire safety or security systems. It also defines minimum requirements on service output and documentation.
“The draft standard is causing quite a few headaches to users, the industry and the certification bodies,” says Enzo Peduzzi, president of Euralarm. “On the contrary of what is current practice in many countries today, the standard does not define in detail every single criteria which a service provider has to fulfill to comply with the standard.”
Management system standard
Adoption in all European and CEN/CENELEC countries coverage of all disciplines of fire safety and security hinges on the standard being designed as a ‘management system standard’.
Unlike the traditional national service standards the industry is accustomed to this EN-standard will be designed with the ISO 9000 type standard in mind. The test criteria will be defined in a ‘Certification Scheme’ for each individual category of systems in fire safety and security.
“Euralarm is aware that the standard alone will not provide enough details and information to guarantee comparable level of quality of services provided from one service provider or another – in particular if the service providers are based in different countries,” says Peduzzi.
Therefore Euralarm launched a discussion with 24 accredited and renowned certification bodies from several European countries about how the new standard could be instituted and how the national certification schemes could be converged with a pan-European Scheme.
Responding positively, says Euralarm, the certification bodies agreed to consider forming a stakeholder group. The group would seek to surmount the myriad national certification structures linked to national legislation, national culture/history, well-known local marks and local scheme owners and reach a compromise which accounts for existing local structures into consideration. This would create an open market for service providers to operate in all EU countries, undertaking only country-specific certification processes.
Says Peduzzi: “At Euralarm we believe that with the introduction of this new standard we have the unique opportunity to define the pan-European criteria for the certification of service providers. This would be a major breakthrough for the European Fire and Security industry.”
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