CE Marking and BS EN 1090 (UK)

Not sure if this is relevant to anyone on this site but I am struggling to find other forums with valid advice regarding this topic and thought that there maybe someone in the same industry here that could help.

We are a UK based welding/fabrication company certified to ISO9001 and I'm looking to find out if it is worthwhile for us to get certification to BS EN 1090 in order to CE mark fabricated structures. If anyone has experience in gaining certification I have many questions regarding the process and how similar it is to 9001.

There is one company similar to us that are CE marking structures, when I queried them they aren't actually certified and had presumed that full traceability and providing QA packs (as we do for the 9001) meant they could self certify which they have been doing with no repercussions. This leads me onto another question of how it is actually monitored?

Any advice on the subject would be greatly received.

Thanks

 

Hi Aurora,

If the products you fabricate are structural, then they are safety critical, and you likely must have your Factory Production Control certified. But your ISO 9001 certification may be sufficient to meet this requirement (see EN 1090-1:2009, section 6.3.1), provided your welding and other special processes are properly controlled (see EN 1090 Annex B). So if you also have ISO 3834 certification, then that may be sufficient in lieu of the FPC certification. Maybe that is what the company you mention has?

I don't know if or how CE marking is monitored. My guess is that it is a matter of liability. If a company declares certain performance and CE mark its products without being fully compliant then it will be found negligent or worse if things go wrong later.

My company had both ISO 9001 and ISO 3834 certificates, but we still decided to get the FPC certification. We are not based in the EU and we wanted to be sure that we complied with all requirements.

By the way, you may want to take a look at EU Regulation 305:2011, and at a book titled "Guide to the CE Marking of Structural Steelwork", published by ECCS. Those documents were very useful when we decided to get our FPC certified.

Good luck!

 

Thank you for the information Pancho!

That may well be the case for the Company I spoke to, I will go back and check with them.

The products we are looking at fabricating are structural with EXC 2 so with the Construction Product Regs (CPR) that came into force in July 2014 are required to have CE marking. I have been looking at the ISO 3834 certification and we do have all the controls in place required for the WQMS and the FPC; material traceability, welding procedures, quality control procedures etc with some of our procedures requiring tightened/tweaked here or there. When I spoke to a consultant I was put under the impression that in order to CE mark we had to be certified to BS EN 1090 which in turn means we are compliant with the ISO 3834 - am wary that this was a sales call and would be biased, hence the requirement for a second opinion.

I have been researching the regulations but am finding it confusing at which standards/books to purchase in order to not waste company money (my background is not in construction industry) but will certainly look into the Guide to the CE Marking of Structural Steelwork. Looks like I have some more reading to do!

Thanks again