A QR code on the machine. The right manual behind it for ten years.
From January 2027 the Machinery Regulation lets you deliver instructions digitally, on four conditions. Everplate is built around all four: upload the documents you already have, engrave the plate we generate, and that code keeps opening this machine’s own manual and declarations for as long as your duty runs.
14 days. Cancel any time.
Your supplier wrote the manual. The duty is also yours.
An importer is not a courier in this regulation. Article 13(4) makes you responsible for the machine arriving with its instructions and the Article 10(7) information. Article 13(8) gives you your own ten year duty to keep the EU declaration of conformity at the disposal of market surveillance authorities, and to be able to produce the technical documentation on request. An authorised representative carries the same ten year duty under Article 12(2)(a). None of it ends when the supplier relationship does.
What Article 10(7) requires
The way in is on the machine
The machine itself, or its packaging, has to show how to reach the digital instructions. In practice that means a QR code and a printed address on the nameplate.
The reader can keep a copy
Whoever scans the code has to be able to print the instructions and save them to their own device. The reason is in the text: they are needed when the machine has stopped, and the network may have stopped with it.
Ten years is the floor
Online for the expected lifetime of the machine, and never less than ten years from the day that particular unit was sold. A machine built to last twenty years carries a twenty year duty.
How it works
Three steps, once per machine version.
You do the first two. After that the code does the work, and you only come back when something needs correcting.
- 01
Upload the documents you already have
The instructions for use, the declaration of conformity, the declaration of incorporation, in each language you sell into. PDFs, exactly as they are. Everplate does not rewrite them and does not translate them.
- 02
Engrave the plate we generate
You get back a permanent web address, a QR code, and print-ready artwork sized so the address is still legible on a small plate. Send the artwork to your engraver and fix it to the machine.
- 03
Leave it alone
Scanning the code opens that machine’s documents, in every language you published, with nothing to log into. Ten years later it still does. If you need to correct something, you publish a revision behind the same code and the machines already installed pick it up.
One QR code per machine, and it never points anywhere else.
A machine sold in 2027 has to keep opening the 2027 instructions. Not next year’s model documentation, and not whatever happens to be newest on your website. Once that code is stamped into metal, nobody can change where it goes.
So the address is fixed the moment you publish and is never reassigned. A correction becomes a new revision behind the same code; the file it replaced stays readable with its original date; and a new model gets a new code of its own, so nobody is handed documentation for a machine they do not own.
- 01Opens on any phone, with nothing to log into
- 02Corrections are added, never written over
- 03Every file downloadable, any time
The part you cannot produce from a folder.
Years from now somebody may ask what was online for one specific machine. So every publication is written down as it happens. Six things are kept for each version you publish:
What gets recorded
- Model and versionWhich machine the code belongs to, and which issue of its documentation
- AddressThe exact URL the QR code resolved to
- LanguagesEvery language that version was published in
- ChecksumA fingerprint of each file, so a single changed byte is detectable
- DateThe day that version went online
- RevisionsWhich revision is current, and every earlier one it replaced
You can download the record together with the files. It is written for whoever ends up asking: a market surveillance authority, an insurer after an incident, or a buyer doing due diligence on a used machine.
The file is the easy part. The ten years after it are not.
You can put a PDF on your own website, and for one machine you probably should. It stops being an answer once you have a catalogue of models, a decade of corrections, and someone asking which file was online in 2029. Four things a folder on your own server will not do:
Those four things are the product. The hosting is just where they live.
- 01
Prove which file was online, in which languages, at which address, on the day one specific machine was sold.
- 02
Keep a 2027 URL working through three website rebuilds, a CMS migration and a rebrand.
- 03
Push a correction to machines already installed without also handing them next year’s model documentation.
- 04
Do all of the above for every manufacturer you represent, not just one.
Your domain. Your files. Your record.
From Pro up, manuals are served from a hostname you own, so the address engraved on your machines belongs to you. Export every file and the full publication record whenever you want, in the same directory layout the QR codes already use: unzip it behind any web server and every code resolves again, unchanged. Published revisions are write-once and keep their original dates and checksums, so what you served in 2027 still verifies in 2037.
That is architecture, not a clause in a contract.