Notes from the President Rel 11.0 - General Assembly 2007

Dear Euralarm Member

The Euralarm General Assembly 2007 in Berlin was, in every respect, a real success:

1. ZVEI did a marvellous job in organizing the local arrangements, i.e. the partners programme, the GALA dinner and everything around the meeting including the excellent farewell lunch. It is with pleasure that I thank ZVEI for their efforts on behalf of Euralarm. You set the hurdle for next meetings really high!
2. The programme was well appreciated by the attendees. The programme content and the time management were positively commented. We heard very good presentations, and we made important decisions about the future development of Euralarm. I recommend that you take some minutes to have a look at the new Euralarm WEB site where in the members area you can find the programme of the General Assembly and all presentations.
3. At the end of the GA we distributed a questionnaire that was asking the attendees to give their comments about the GA. As you can see from the statistics at the end of my notes the response of the attendees was very positive. Most importantly the majority of the attendees declared that the GA was a worthwhile event to attend, and that they will attend future General Assemblies.

The GA 2008 will be in Sofia/Bulgaria.

Our new member trade association NAFOTS – the Bulgarian Association of Equipment Based Security Companies - has spontaneously and kindly offered to organize GA 2008! We are certainly thanking for this offer and we are looking forward to have our meeting in Sofia. The date of this event will be published shortly.

Let me now address some points discussed at the GA:

The discussion about the progress of the EQM project was certainly a central topic as theGA had to decide about the further direction the E QM project should take. Let me giveyou a brief account of the situation and the rationale that led to the decision to go aheadwith the implementation of EQM even if we do not have the big 4 (VdS, BRE, AFNOR,CNPP) on board yet.

Our discussions with the major certifiers led us to realize that the ESSA based model presented at the GA 2006 in Seville had some drawbacks that could not be supported by the major certifiers. The major concern was the independence of the certification process and the dominance of the industry in the decision making boards. This led us to review our model, and we developed a new model that accommodates the major concerns of the certifiers, most importantly the independence of the certification process. In the new model the certification process is clearly separated from the management of the EQM and independence of certification and testing is assured. We call this model the EEIG model as a EEIG is the basic structure of it (European Economic Interest Group). In this model the certifiers can play a substantial role in the management of the mark including for instance acceptance criteria for certifiers and test houses, applicable norms and products etc. The industry is involved but certainly not in a dominant role. The EEIG model was positively checked for its compatibility with the relevant European norms.

The EEIG model was shown to VdS in Feb 2007 and they stated that the model is a good starting point. VdS agreed to propose this model at their “EQM” meeting with BRE, AFNOR, and CNPP on March 14, 2007. The result of that meeting was negative: the EEIG model was unanimously rejected. Note that Euralarm was not present at the meeting as we were not invited. Hence, we had no chance to present our model, and we do not know why the model was rejected. However, we were informed that VdS, BRE, AFNOR and CNPP agreed to propose to Euralarm a new model where Euralarm would (again) be relegated into an advisory role with some tasks to be defined – much the same model as the previous JV model proposed by VdS/BRE in Nov 2005. You know that this type of model has been absolutely rejected by the industry members of Euralarm and also by the GA 2006. We have not heard of any other meeting between the 4 certifiers that should have detailed their proposal to Euralarm. Euralarm got the feeling that we have a significant difference in our goals and time tables to implement EQM and that we are continuously being delayed.

It is for this reason and due to the heavy pressures from the industry both from multinational large and national small enterprises that Euralarm has decided to start implementation of the EEIG scheme and discuss with certifiers outside the range of the big 4. Of course in doing so we are in the process of fine tuning our model. And this is where we are right now. We have installed a project team dedicated to implement EQM as quickly as possible. The project team is led by Hansjürg Mahler (Siemens). He is supported by Brian Harrington (Castle Care-Tech) and Frederic Chateau (DEF).This team is a good mix representing the interests of large multinational and medium / small companies in the fire and security business. We have the commitment of the respective CEO’s that the team can spend a substantial work time towards the implementation of EQM, thus confirming and supporting at the same time the direction Euralarm is taking.

It certainly must remain our intention to include the major certifiers in our scheme.

We heard an excellent presentation on the service directive, SD (see Euralarm WEB site). In the discussion that followed it became clear that Fire and Security have different positions on whether to be included or exempted from the SD. Furthermore it became also clear that the consequences of being in or out of the SD were differently interpreted. We therefore decided to review the service directive once more and analyse of the pros and cons of being in or out, both for fire and security. We expect a SWOT analysis per Section and a plan to implement our position. If possible we would like to come to a common Euralarm position for the two sections. The Euralarm task group “Service Directive” leads the project.

Long term Quo Vadis is the most important project of Euralarm as it must secure the future of Euralarm. We have discussed the future development of Euralarm already at our meeting in Sevilla. In Berlin Bert van Langeveld further detailed a possible structure of Euralarm in which the most important new idea is the addition of two new Sections “Service Providers Fire” and “Service Providers Security”. The presentation also suggested innovative ways and means to generate income for Euralarm. While Quo Vadis has high priority it was decided to once again focus our attention to EQM. However, to keep the Quo Vadis ball rolling Bert van Langeveld should come up with a realistic phase plan for the implementation of the two new sections including all the consequences.

We expect a status report by the EU mid September 2007.

We heard two excellent presentations on this increasingly important topic. Rather than summarizing the presentations I recommend that you go to the original presentation by Jos van Kampen on “Alarm Transmission” and Dr. Udo Helmbrecht (BSI – German Federal Office for Information Security) on “IT Security”. Both papers give an excellent overview of the actual situation – that is alarming indeed - and they make recommendations on how to assure a secure alarm transmission and how to deal with the multiple and costly threats in the internet.

Below you find a summary of the Euralarm targets for this year. They follow from the discussion above.

1. EQM
   Implementation by Dec 07
2. Quo Vadis
   Develop phase plan for implementation of BP and implement phase 1 by May 2008
3. Service Directive
   Rework Euralarm position. SWOT for being in/out for Fire and/or Security. Position paper ready by Dec 2007. Initiate development of pan European Service Guidelines
4. Membership
   Review Euralarm statutes in view of multiple applications for Euralarm membership. Continue membership drive in new Member States. Review membership fees
5. CPD
   Monitor revision. Status expected Sep 2007
6. SC
   Separate working programmes. EC delegate to report publishable results to SC1

Finally, I would like to thank for the contributions of all participants at the GA 2007. These contributions of course made the GA 2007 a memorably event.

Best regards,

Gustav Pfister

President Euralarm