Since the CEBEC certification mark recently had its 100th anniversary, we asked our long-time client Barco to reflect on what CEBEC certification has meant to their innovative journey. Our colleague Kris de Potter asked Dora Deboeure, Product Validation expert at Barco, to share her insights into the longstanding collaboration.
Can you give a small presentation of your company and your products?
Barco, headquartered in Kortrijk, Belgium, is a global technology company specializing in visualization and collaboration technology across healthcare, enterprise, and entertainment sectors. The company has over 3,000 visioneers, whose passion for technology is captured in over 500 unique patents.
In the healthcare division, Barco's technology is integrated at nearly every patient interaction point, from imaging rooms to surgical suites, with over 800k installations. Their solutions and services help medical professionals enable better health outcomes and work more efficiently in an increasingly complex healthcare enterprise.
Their enterprise solutions focus on enhancing collaboration and engagement in various settings like boardrooms and classrooms. With over one million ClickShare meeting room installations and 15k control rooms, they are a market and technology leader in wireless presentation and conferencing.
In the entertainment sector, Barco Entertainment aims to bring experiences to life through their innovative, reliable immersive experience and cinema solutions, having installed over 100k cinema projectors and 10k UDX.
The CTF laboratory, recognized as the "SMT lab" since 2002, is part of Barco's commitment to quality and innovation. It recently relocated to President Kennedypark in 2016 and currently houses a safety test team of six personnel.
What benefits do you see in having the CEBEC mark on your products?
Having a third-party certification mark such as CEBEC on our products, provides our customers with the assurance that our products are verified and certified to comply with the European safety standards by an independent and internationally recognized certification agency.
The CEBEC mark adds to the trustworthiness of our CE marking. Since the CE marking is a manufacturers declaration, it is only as good and trustworthy as the manufacturer himself.
With the CEBEC mark on our product labels, we can assure that every user, service technician or operator can safely install, use or maintain our products.
How has the CEBEC mark helped you grow your business?
The benefit of having CEBEC as a certification mark for the EU and due to working with CEBEC, Barco was able to install the same advantages of third-party certification in various other countries and regions in the world.
CEBEC is our partner for international CB product safety certification as well as in the US & Canada, and various countries in Africa and the Near-East.
Governmental organizations or products to be used in public places in those countries often require their own country certificate on top of the international safety report and certificate.
Using CEBEC for all these country certifications gives Barco a cost and time to market advantage compared to companies who don’t make use of this combined service solution.
What advice would you give to other companies considering the CEBEC mark?
Don’t hesitate to reach out to CEBEC, their people are their biggest asset. Unlike other certification partners, your projects are not assigned to other engineers on a regular basis.
It’s a real advantage being able to work with the same people for years, they experience how a company’s products evolve within the innovation mindset. CEBEC adapts to this evolving technology and is an enabler when it comes to verification and certification of new technologies and innovations.
What has been your best experience with CEBEC?
When Barco took the next step in innovating its projectors with a light source consisting of combined laser light instead of a lamp, the product safety standard for this kind of projectors still had to be written.
Till the publication of that product standard, Barco’s safety engineering team had to select and use parts of other existing product standards to verify compliance concerning the use of laser light and the required cooling mechanism with the European and international product safety regulations.
Where other certification partners would focus on what we could not be applied, CEBEC worked with us to focus what parts of other product safety standards could apply on laser projectors. CEBEC subject matter experts reviewed all our calculations and measurements.
When the laser illuminated projector safety standard was published, Barco could use all the tests and calculations we had done previously to show compliance with this standard.
How has CEBEC helped you to meet your regulatory requirements?
CEBEC has been the partner of Barco for many years now. The backbone to Barco’s product safety verification is our safety engineering team in Belgium, Kortrijk.
When Barco decided to also install an R&D team in China, Beijing to develop products for the EU market and worldwide, CEBEC was the logical partner to get involved with the Chinese team too.
Thanks to the product knowledge of the CEBEC team in Belgium, they can easily verify the test reports from the China team and grant their products the CEBEC mark too.
The same organization, the same CEBEC people verify and certify both our Belgian and our Chinese designs. Our customers can be sure that wherever a Barco product is designed, it meets the same product safety standards.
