Spain Needs To Adapt Eight Million Doors To the CE Mark

For more than 25 years, businesses have been applying different directives and standards to automatic, industrial, commercial, and garage doors. But this has not been enough because the level of compliance with the current regulations required, synthesized in the CE Mark, is very low, warns Juan Ramirez, chairman of FIMPA.

The Market Unification Working Group advises the Sectoral Conference of Industry and SMEs. According to the working group’s recent reports, recent monitoring campaigns have revealed problems with installed doors regarding CE mark conformance, including recently installed doors. More than 90% of the inspections found deficiencies or shortcomings in CE mark conformance. These were mainly about documentation, but more than 60% concerned safety devices, which is much more alarming.

For Juan Ramírez, there is no doubt that “the sector’s most pressing need is to adapt eight million doors across Spain to conform to the CE mark.” So, compliance with current legislation “would make them safer to use.”

Involving the Whole Sector

FIMPA’s chairman affirms that any solution to this issue will have to involve all the sector’s stakeholders (manufacturers, installers, maintainers and owners) and spread awareness in government and public bodies. The latter are mainly those of the Ministry of Industry and regional and municipal government.

“Other sectors have regulations that set out requirements, periodic checks and clear maintenance guidelines, and records and monitoring of installations to ensure safe use by owners and users, but ours is different,” he says.

“In our case,” he adds, “we need to set up a register of installed automatic doors, maintained by companies, and the companies should be registered, too. That would allow the competent government bodies to ensure that these doors are safe to use.” Unfortunately, these long-standing demands by the Federation of Associations have so far not been satisfied.

Replacement Plans

Ramirez explains that a very effective way to adapt the installed doors could be through “Replacement Plans,” as proposed by regional governments. These plans would motivate owners to make improvements and modifications to their automatic doors to conform to the CE mark.

FIMPA’s chairman also reminds us about the importance of complying with Occupational Risk Prevention regulations. These are also applicable to industrial automatic doors, as they are machinery. This is also another effective way to adapt these doors to the CE Mark.

And, finally, he reminds the External Prevention Services that they should “include automatic doors in the industrial scope when carrying out Occupational Risk Prevention audits in companies.”