Bjorn Mjatveit
Technical Education Committee Member
EMR Consulting AS
Bergen, Norway
Standards, regulations, requirements, laws, customer specifications and even internal over-engineered demands have become an inseparable part of our everyday reality. No matter where you operate in the world, the most common response to challenges seems to be drafting a new standard, guideline or regulatory framework. The outcome is often a quality system that grows into mountains of documents, procedures and processes—each one intended to ensure quality, but collectively threatening to overwhelm both workshops and engineers.
In an article titled “Enhancing Efficiency in an Electric Motor Workshop: An Unconventional Approach” that was published in the November 2024 edition of Currents, I addressed non-conformance cases and how deviations, mistakes or overly cautious measures often lead to inefficiencies and extra costs. The regulatory landscape follows two main tracks. First, it reduces risk by ensuring that even less experienced personnel can work within a safe and structured framework. Second, it promotes standardization, ensuring that a motor procured in one country will meet minimum requirements and fit seamlessly into another system later in its lifecycle. This benefits global trade, logistics and maintenance.
However, navigating this ever-expanding pile of regulations is time-consuming and difficult for a single workshop. Trying to influence regulators is even harder, since you must provide input to legislators, consultants, manufacturers and other stakeholders—each with their own agenda. Fortunately, as members of EASA, we are not alone. EASA maintains several working committees and groups, collecting input from members, customers and asset owners. EASA engineers and volunteers participate in key standardization bodies such as IEEE and IEC, allowing our industry’s experience to positively shape future standards and regulations. See go.easa.com/representation. EASA also monitors upcoming regulatory trends, giving its members valuable foresight.
While EASA participates in various standards group, we are quite sure that members also do so – and we would like to know who you are (and with which groups) so that we can coordinate better as an industry. This could provide stronger dialogue and collaboration in order to give our industry an even louder voice. By pooling our expertise, we can ensure that decades of accumulated know-how are considered in standards and regulatory processes—not just imposed upon us afterward.
To this end, we will be sending a survey early next year to members to ask if you are involved in any standards/regulatory groups, which ones, and so forth. Be on the lookout for it and participate when you receive it!
This African proverb is still valid: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The challenge for our industry is to balance compliance with efficiency, and to make sure that regulations remain a tool for progress, not a barrier to it.
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