Hi all
Currently working in a small mechanical design / special machines, I am trying to find out if there is a legal retention period for the processed belongings as well as calculation notes (metal structures, lifting, special machine)?
If not, what is your archival retention policy?
Thank you all
Hello
For my part, you have to keep everything, even if it's writing, or even scan them and list them by year; customer; Case No.
Because it's good to find old things...
For example, for a car manufacturer, is obliged to supply standard exchange parts for 10 years.
That is my advice.
@+.
AR
Hello
I am not aware of a general rule.
On the other hand, you mention very specific cases (lifting, structure) that can engage your criminal liability. In such cases, I would keep it for the whole time of the machine's existence.
Hello
As a matter of principle, we keep everything (except computer problems) as long as the company exists, today's hard drives allow us to do so.
It is not uncommon for some products made 10 years ago to come back, because even if the design methods have changed, a large part of the study is already done. (I'm in wood/aluminum packaging)
A+
Of course, I ask this question because our physical "paper" archives are reaching saturation and we have no possibility of extension (even container solutions or other).
For the moment we keep a paper copy and a copy on the cloud, knowing that some archives date back to 1962. For this reason, a "legal" expiry date would have helped me to make a selection.
Thank you
Hello Clément
If it's a special machine then you know all the customers with whom it is installed.
Then your brilliant salesman can contact them and if, for example, no more machines are used, for example after 1968, you will be able to advise on the fate of the documents of the time.
Another point is the warranty date. If the warranty is for example 5 years then anything that is 10 years beyond the warranty is garbage. Otherwise it's reverse-engineering for the very rare part that would need to be changed.
But also maintenance obligation if your customer has not subscribed and has carried out maintenance monitoring by your company so that you cannot be held responsible beyond the warranty.
It all depends on the type of contract with your customers, especially when the contracts are particularly abstruse on the subject.
In addition, you are not required to be able to restock parts that have not been manufactured specifically for the customer (typically off-the-shelf parts). This is the tragedy of DARTY and other companies that do maintenance that know how to repair everything except certain electronic boards.
Last point if they are special machines it means that they are not delivered in large numbers to many customers (to see what you make)
So you would have to make a table with several entries and see which customers are in the sketch or not.
Kind regards
The problem is that we are a design office integrated into a very large company (steel company not to name it). Our "customers" are the different parts of the factory and we work exclusively internally. We don't have a sales representative, and every person in the factory can theoretically show up at our office.
The turnover of the staff responsible for the facilities is quite huge and we therefore have no one who could be a reference and find out about the status of the facilities or whether they are even still up to date.
For this reason, having no real space to store the archives, and in the idea that what, after a certain age, can be switched to reverse engineering, I was in charge of doing a big cleaning up in the paper archives. But I wanted to check before that whether there were any legal conditions for storage.
It smells like a scan galore to keep everything all the same....
Thank you all
The context changes a lot of things.
I'm surprised that on a large site, there isn't an inventory of machines that exists: for more or less predictive maintenance, legal inventory (immobilization).
This may be an opportunity to do so: to see the cost between a scan of a huge quantity of plans and the time to spend to inventory the machines and optimize the scan.
Yes, maybe I should have specified but I wanted to adjust as much as possible to the functioning of the external design office. For a long time, the internal operation was a bit of a do-it-yourself.
The inventory of machines is materially impossible, and I am only talking about the machines on which we have had to work. For the rest of the site , we sometimes don't even have the plans of our own machines, which are sometimes modified in the field without feedback from the people who work on them for an update of the plans. BRIEF
The idea of the head of the BE was to see the possibility of sorting down cases that were too old, for which we no longer had an obligation to keep documents.
Hello @stefbeno
Very well seen for real estate
And in this type of business, the management of real estate is often problematic because of the complexity and especially the difficulty of making the link between the accounting of the real estate and the physical. Especially when a homogeneous production set has been built up over time, without too many accounting worries, especially when the machines are manufactured in production for oneself (the real value being underestimated most of the time).
The real estate remains in the accounts even when the net book value is equal to zero, as long as it is used by the company.
[HS ON Mode]
I had the opportunity to be in charge of an inventory of a large company whose entire activity was linked to coherent and linked systems spread over more than 3000 sites and this required setting up a project team working in tandem with a firm specializing in large inventories.
We found very big holes in the racket but also very funny situations of systems offered to a museum that we would have had a lot of trouble tracking, if a very old retiree had not told us where to find this imposing set ;-)
[HS /OFF MODE]
Kind regards
Hello
Clement, if the BE is internal without a distinct corporate distinctive (not a SARL different from the large company for example) then you have no legal obligation in the true sense.
I would say that you only have a moral duty that is consistent with the objectives of society.
I wish you and your head of design office enormous courage in the face of these Cornelian and even Shakespearean "put or not put" choices in the dumpster, that is the question.
Kind regards
Hello @ All and @ All
Thank you also to all the other contributors who, through their opinions and remarks, have clarified the context and helped Clément to have information based on our experiences and knowledge of the industrial environment.
Kind regards
Thank you all for your answers;)
Hi all
I'm a little late in the conversation, but I'm reassured (or not) to see that the problems of tool tracking are the same in large groups as in SMEs.
Because it's true that workshops are the specialists to quietly modify custom-made machines, then 5 years later come and ask for the plans to duplicate the same machine, and grumble because we don't have the right plans. (but we like them anyway).
We have better here Pierre S, They make structural changes and ask us afterwards for an NDC ...