OT: Does my product need CE Marking?

Indeed, but the Japanese don't get quite so obsessive about having cubic yards of controlled documents to show their ISO9000 inspectors. Small incremental improvements are still relatively easy there.

What it does is ensure manufacturing process reproducability.

And instil a do it by the book mentality that results in a lower quality product than would be obtained if employees were encouraged to *think* about what it is they are doing and suggest improvements.

You may (read as: I don't know, because I haven't read it :-)) find some useful, official information here

On a practical note I'd say, CE marking is required in any case if you want to sell something in Europe, because everybody adds the CE marking on their product. Especially if your are dealing with public customers, CE marked products are usually required and it is written so in the contract. Another scenario is that one of your competitors wants to get you out of business and tries to sue you, because you don't have a CE marking. However the above cases and similar scenarios are just legal stuff, which lawyers use to get rich ...

Technically speaking, nobody really cares about whether a product is CE marked or not, because one has learned the hard way, that it basically doesn't certify anything. Serious manufacturers of course do make well engineered products, which thus usually will pass any CE related testing by default (requirements are in general very low). Due to the self-certification process less serious manufacturers just print the CE sign on anything which falls off their assembly line. Common translation of CE in Europe is "China Export" or as John already cited "can't enforce". This sarcasm is based on the bitter experience, that even if you find a product which obviously is a dangerous product (like mains cabling which has a way to small cross section or violates generally accepted standards of ingression protection) it still will bear a CE marking and even if you then contact authorities usually nothing will happen. On a good day the authorities will require that the reseller takes back the dangerous products. They usually appear some time later again at another reseller ...

Just my two cents Klaus

Yeah, deciding what specs are needed. Does any know if a resistor or a diode require CE certification? That is a bit different than a cert for a (downhole) neutron detector that uses those components.

BTW, no equipment needs the cert if NOT sold in the EU, and only anal retentive customs "people" would steal (err.. "confiscate") such equipment going thru a given country to be used elsewhere.

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Actually, that would be a stupid reason. A good reason is, ASS-u-ME-ing an item falls under the CE requirements, NOT having the mark could be very expensive - each EU country could levy a $100,000 fine and the "committee" could press for jail terms along with their fine. Strangely enough, it seems that using a CE mark incorrectly has worse repercussions.

That process you described can easily fail if there never was any smoke or flame; the next required steps of ejecting toast, etc could not be executed because the stated requirements never happened. So.. in some deep almost dark corner is a toaster sitting with a black slab inside, still going after 20 years...

WOW!!! Thanks a LOT. Just created an account, will work on this later as have commitments the rest of the day.

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That's the primary motivation for UL, and such, but CE is a requirement for sales into the EU.

Hasn't it been shown that ISO9000 doesn't, statistically, improve quality?

Now how would they do that? Send over a couple of battle ships? Or would a black sedan pull up in front of your house in the middle of the night and three dudes with trenchcoats and sunglasses would hop out, guns drawn?

It statistically improves your paperwork. Tons & tons of otherwise useless paperwork for the UL dweebs to dig through, looking for a missed period, or lined out item.

Not 12 years ago, but try to get CE certs now, and watch them ask you what your documentation standard is.

Quite likely. Like most tools, it can be useful or dangerous. When it comes down as edict (the usual situation), the outcome is probably less than good.

I assume you're talking about UL being the ISO auditor?

At least one other person here knows it is not a quality standard.

It is an organizational standard, as it were.. A method by which one documents the standards one uses to get from parts to assemblies.

So, it is essentially a standard that forces you to document your processes, and then follow them.

Having the moniker in your portfolio of company operations is a huge selling point, because it proves that you are fairly organized in your procedures, policies, and documents which provide instructions for said procedures, and documents which describe them. Pretty much all a customer would care about when deciding whether you can manufacture in a consistent manner.

It ends up improving quality, so most uninformed folks give it a cursory description as a quality standard. But it isn't.

Kind of like 5S. Folks thought that was just "cleaning up". What it really does is organize work process flows, AND it cleans up work areas so confusion is minimized, and it minimizes material handling logistics wherever possible. It is five Japanese words. There are English "S" equivalent terms.

I've had several of my products go through the full CE testing in the last six months. They are OEM products that we sell to a world-class company that you have heard of and bought from. The OEM paid for the testing, by professional labs, and their test staff managed the process. I signed the final Declarations of Conformity. Nobody mentioned ISO9000. Nobody mentioned documentation standards. They reviewed the hardware, the schematics, the BOMs, the PCB layouts, and the manuals, and needed documentation on some of the parts, like power transformers. We had to make some minor changes, like adding an insulator or revising a manual.

I had to rev one manual to say the equivalent of "This unit is heavy, so don't move it unless you know how to move heavy stuff" with the triangle-exclamation-point thing for emphasis.

You are AlwaysWrong.

Would a fleet of battleships make it up the Sacramento River?

Can you really be that dumb?

The Electronics manufacturing world has since moved on, however.

Can you tell us what the current 'desired by customers' 'standard' is these days?

Even though we are with COTS now, is there not still a mil std? We follow them when the customer requires it.

But we are actually back on quality standard again.

Most makers these days follow IPC. As in IPC-A-610 rev F for process standards. It is actually a visual standard in many cases.

If you are "a company" you pay fines and fees and penalties, or you get drummed out of the business. Pretty sure failure to pay, when you were trying to sell in that geographic locale would pretty much kill ANY future sales of ANY product from you.

So... you were saying?

Well, i have had ZERO competitors for the last 2-3 years maybe more. Forgot when Titan Industries (ref: the Mosley patent mentioned on my site) threw in the towel. They tried to drive us out of the market by lowering their price; we simply met their price and waited for them to quit as at the then $200/unit, they were making very little profit (if any). Total manual construction - twist leads of (selected) discretes together, solder, fold and pot. My site pokes fun at them "model T" etc since their devices could literally fall apart at high temperature and created a lot of noise across the PMT.