Annual Report 2003 Europump Long Range Goals How it began Europump today Looking forward Europump Guides Europump's Organization The liaisons The Commissions Useful Addresses Europump Position Papers Business Guidelines

	Technical Matters
	Marketing
	Standards
	Publications and Public Relations
	Small companies networking

Technical Matters   

The commission was set up shortly after Europump was fully established, with responsibility for all matters of technical interest to the pump profession and its customers.

Recognizing that many users and even some pump manufacturers did not quite understand the true meaning and implications of the term NPSH, one of the very first tasks undertaken by the commission was to prepare a simple document outlining importance, calculation and measurement of NPSH. It was published in 1974, has been widely used ever since and is often quoted as a reference. Since then, many important tasks have been performed by the technical commission and its sub-groups. Among the ones of later dates we find a test code for positive displacement pumps and recommendations for permissible noise emission and vibration levels of centrifugal pumps.

Over the years valuable contribution has also been made to various tasks undertaken by the ISO/TC 115 Pump Committee to the extent that Europump is now an authorized source of working documents for ISO and CEN.

Marketing   

Although the Marketing Commission is of a fairly recent origin, it has nevertheless come to be one of the more important and significant bodies. The very wide scope of remittance resulted already at the beginning in a number of working groups, specializing in particular areas.

The first group had the title: Fringe Areas and was set up to deal with the many important business-related issues like Delivery and Payment Conditions, Warranty Conditions etc. Its work resulted in 15 Fringe Area Guiding Principles, later to be revised and reprinted as a booklet in 1987.

The commission has also been responsible for the original EEC Nomenclature of Import/Export NIMEXE for pumps and its conversion to the current Combined Nomenclature.

Another activity is the annual inter-firm business ratio comparison, based on a questionnaire sent out to all companies of the member associations. The results are published and distributed to all participating companies.

Other issues include for example, Product Liability, Sales Contract Conditions and the regular compilation of the appreciated book "Member Companies’ Profiles".

Standards   

As the name indicates, this commission possesses the expertise specialized on standardization matters.
It has the following responsibilities:

• To prepare the required pump specialist recommendations with the view of making an official reference text to serve as the basis for a national or international standard.
• To gather documents related to standards and regulations for pumps produced in the European countries.
• To work for a harmonization of existing national or other standards, with the aim to produce documents that could help create new standards to be used throughout the European Union.

Publications and public relations   

One of the earliest activities of Europump was the compilation of a multi-lingual technical vocabulary.
To deal with this task a special committee was established, on the occasion of the foundation of Europump itself, in 1960. In all logic with its mission it was named "Commission 1: Technical Vocabulary".

The result was issued in 1968 in two volumes with the titles "Pump Classifications" and "Names of Pump Components".

In 1992 the commission, earlier renamed "Terminology", merged with another of the oldest commissions "Publicity and Publications", established already in 1964. The name of the new commission became "Publications and Public Relations".

The commission is responsible for the production and issue of all the works of the four commissions as well as the provision and dissemination of all news and information to the media on behalf of Europump. It is also authorized with the direct liaison link with the official organ of Europump, the international technical magazine World Pumps.

Small companies networking

SMEs are willing to respond to the changing business environment in particular to the currently strong trend to mergers or take-overs as a result of market globalisation.

It is essential to improve competitiveness in this global context.

The aims of today's dialogue should be:

• to explore the potential of joint activities in the EU-marketplace
• to meet qualified potential business partners, eventually
• to respond to the changing demands of the market jointly with the best and most sophisticated products and services

Europump as an organisation seeks to facilitate these goals for SMEs. In addition the Executive Council is prepared to establish a firm link with this networking initiative, which attained the status of a permanent Europump Networking Commission. By such an organisation, it will be possible to pay more attention to the specific needs of SMEs and to give guidance and support from EU-government and Europump experts in the fields of export market access, common research or others.