Terry, You have raised a very good question. The problem is that the U.S. had only one approved safety agency for so long, that it is difficult to wean non-laymen away from that one agency mark. This includes your (and my) management, marketing, customers, etc. Few of these understand the meaning of NRTL, with its variety of agency approvals and marks.
I did fight this battle over an off-the-shelf peripheral we needed to market which did not have the "traditional" safety mark, but an acceptable NRTL mark. One of the positions I to confront was that many Federal, state, or local "government" bids require "the" mark. I referenced the Code of Federal Regulations, OSHA sections, citing acceptable U.S. authorized NRTLs. I pointed out that compliance to UL 1950 was the needed requirement, not which agency did the actual assessment. One problem is that those who write the specifications for government bids are not aware of this fact, and do continue to list only one agency mark into the document. In a way, this is probably a violation of federal law, i.e. requiring vendors to do "business" with a specified private company, thus stifling any competition. Isn't this what the goverment is accusing Microsoft of doing? You are exactly right. As PSE professionals, we should be able to look for and use whatever options are legally available to meet our employer's certification needs in the most timely and cost effective manner. Unfortunately, in the U.S. this requires a significant amount of internal and external education as to the actual legal options. George Alspaugh Lexmark International Inc. ---------------------- Forwarded by George Alspaugh/Lex/Lexmark on 11/19/99 01:41 PM --------------------------- tjmeck%accusort....@interlock.lexmark.com on 11/19/99 12:25:38 PM Please respond to tjmeck%accusort....@interlock.lexmark.com To: emc-pstc%ieee....@interlock.lexmark.com cc: (bcc: George Alspaugh/Lex/Lexmark) Subject: NRTL acceptance Hi: We have been using an old reliable but very busy Safety agency to review our products and apply their safety mark. >From time to time we are approached by their competitors, NRTLs, or European soon to be NRTL labs for our business. My question is in this `NRTL enlightened market are there still inspectors out there that will still require education about the NRTL status and the acceptability of an NRTL lab Listing vs the old familiar ones? As you all know time to market is critical and 3 to 6 months is too long to wait. We will need to look for other solutions and I am trying to review the whole range of issues involved in changing the primary NRTL. I hope this is not too commercial a question! If you feel it is please reply to me directly. Thank you! Best regards, Terry J. Meck Senior Compliance/Test Engineer Phone:215-721-5280 Fax:215-721-5551 hard copy; Fax PC: 215.799.1650 To my desk PC tjm...@accusort.com Accu-Sort Systems Inc. 511 School House Rd. Telford, PA 18969-1196 USA --------- This message is coming from the emc-pstc discussion list. To cancel your subscription, send mail to majord...@ieee.org with the single line: "unsubscribe emc-pstc" (without the quotes). For help, send mail to ed.pr...@cubic.com, jim_bac...@monarch.com, ri...@sdd.hp.com, or roger.volgst...@compaq.com (the list administrators).
