Knowledge base for mechanical engineering when you need the old parameter settings and the programmer is about to leave.

It doesn’t replace an archive in the legal sense. But you can ask what exists for a machine number – risk assessment, operating instructions, EU declaration of conformity, circuit diagrams, calculations and the declarations of incorporation for any partly completed machinery you bought in – and the answer gives the source for each. If the system finds nothing for an item, it tells you so; ahead of a market surveillance request, that is exactly what you need to know. In the first weeks after go-live, use a system you have delivered to test whether documents are cleanly matched to the machine number. The ten-year period stays the same when the EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230 applies from 20 January 2027: under it, too, the technical documentation and the declaration of conformity must be kept available for ten years after the machine is placed on the market.

You can ask about the versions that exist – parameter set, circuit diagram, program version – and the answer gives the date, revision note and document for each; if the version only appears in the file name, it says so. Which version applies is still your decision. It helps to add the last modification report and the acceptance record, because these usually show what was set after the last intervention and what was only planned. Whether several near-identically named versions are kept cleanly apart is worth checking in the first weeks after go-live. Whether a change counts as a substantial modification, and what follows from that, is not something the system assesses – it provides the documents that assessment is based on.

You ask by system and period; the answer lists the acceptance and commissioning records, photos, email correspondence and test records that are in the collection, each with date and source – including the email in which the customer himself asked for that setting at the time, if it was filed. Whether a notice of defects under § 377 UGB (the Austrian Commercial Code) was given in time in a transaction that is commercial for both sides is not something the system assesses; it shows who wrote what and when, and with this kind of question that is half the dispute. Your response can be produced as a draft that you read and send yourselves.

Talking instead of writing: a voice note of a few minutes per system, plus his own folders and email threads in full. Then you go through system by system and ask where something exists and where nothing does. If the system finds nothing, it tells you so – and you can still fill the gaps with him while he’s here, instead of guessing two years later. How well voice notes from a noisy shop floor are transcribed is best tried right at the start, in the first weeks after go-live. A list of gaps is a more practical way into the conversation than asking him to write everything down before he retires.