Notes from the Secretariat

Welcome to the Winter 2020 EPSMA newsletter. At time of writing, COVID 19 is peaking again and EPSMA members are unable to meet in person but we had a virtual AGM on the 10th November with good attendance.

Q4 2020 MC meeting and AGM
At the AGM, Bernhard Erdl was re-elected as Chairman and Manfred Schlenk as Vice Chairman. Management committee members who were required to step down on rotation were all willing to stand again and were duly re-elected.
Bernhard Erdl gave his Chairman’s address which included a reminiscence of the early years of the EPSMA which celebrates its 25th anniversary of founding this year. The address can be found in the minutes of the AGM which are in the members’ area of the website.
The new Technical Committee Chairman Vlad Grigore reported on the TC meeting held the previous week and activities during the year. Achievements for the year included the publication of the two documents “Embedded software verification and validation in power supplies” and “Guidelines for lifetime specification of power converters” which are now available for members to view. Abstracts are also on the website for public view. The meeting thanked the teams on the technical committee for their hard work in producing the documents.
Vlad reported on TC discussions about future work of the TC and the EPSMA more generally and it is hoped that at the next MC meeting, a fresh ‘mission statement’ can be agreed and a new program of work set for the TC.
General new initiatives for the EPSMA discussed included closer collaboration with the PSMA, and more active participation with the CENELEC committees concerned with power products and standards.
Paul Lee for the secretariat reported on the year-end finances which showed a small surplus. The budget for 2020/2021 shows a small loss, mainly due to loss of membership fees so efforts will be put into recruiting more members.
Paul lee reported on website visit activity which has shown an increase since releasing the new documents. Work is progressing on a new website which is largely in place. It is hoped that it will be available for approval and go live at the next MC meeting.
The meeting agreed that the 25th anniversary of the EPSMA should be celebrated in some way but deferred until travel restrictions have eased.
The next management committee meeting is scheduled for Friday February 5th at 10am CET. Members will be reminded closer to the date.

Linkedin

We have a ’Linkedin’ forum for members to use and a data base of UL non-conformances for members to log their observations. Contact the secretariat for more details.

CE Marking Issues forum

Remember we have a forum for issues members have with “CE” marking. If you would like to share problems (and resolutions!) With other members, please contact the secretariat with details.