Intergraf is protesting against an EU directive which allows machinery suppliers to dispense with printed instruction books.
The impact will be to disenfranchise some workers, increase industry costs as operators will need to be provided with tools to access the digital manual, and will cost jobs in the printing industry. And while this is an EU directive, the UK will most likely be affected as the manufacturers that drop a printed manual for EU customers will be unwilling to provide a print version for the UK. At the same time UK companies exporting machinery to the EU may decide to cancel print versions.
Digital access can be effective, allowing a degree of interactivity that a print-only instruction book cannot match, but this would require extensive investment and be unnecessary for much machinery.
And the printing industry will be just as affected by the option to eliminate the print version. In a joint statement with Uni Europa Graphical, Intergraf states: “At company level, this requires the employer to provide the technology to the workers to access instructions and the workers to have the appropriate digital skills to access instructions. In a manufacturing sector like ours, this will cause companies in general, and SMEs in particular, an additional administrative and financial burden.” Companies would have to provide additional training as well as the tools to access an online instruction set, something that might also compromise digital security when information has to be downloaded.
The organisations are not against digital versions, saying that online access can be an efficient way to consult information. “However, we do not agree that the digital format replaces the paper instructions that accompany the machinery product. The digital version should rather be considered as a complementary tool,” the two say.
The impulse for the move seems to be a feeling that paper is less sustainable than digital, something that, if implemented, the directive will perpetuate.
As a consequence the statement suggests amending the wording of the directive to say that “In additional to the paper format, the instructions may also be provided in digital format.”
