Club of bologna proceedings

Hans-Hasso BERTRAM 
Yes maybe in the past we needed about two ye-
ars to finish a test completely. So our objective 
now is, if the machine comes in at the end of this 
year or at the beginning of the next year, to pre-
sent the results at the end of the year - Novem-
ber. In this way the industry can use this test re-
port as a marketing tool. This is the first point. 
We try to speed up the tests, by asking what is 
necessary to test, rather than what is possible to 
test. So we try to go back to the important crite-
ria for the results at the end. Without testing all 
that is possible, as we used to do in the past. 
This means that tests will not necessarily take as 
much time as before. The third point is that ma-
ybe we have better test instruments and better 
test methods, which produce the results in a 
shorter time. In particular, this has been achie-
ved in the testing of combine harvesters, for 
which we needed 10 persons in the past, where-
as now only 4 to 5 persons are needed to do the 
job in a very short time: it’s possible to test 
three machines in one and a half hours. 
Giuseppe PELLIZZI
I should like to represent here in this moment 
the point of view of the farmers. Because the in-
dustry of course is not interested in this, but the 
farmers need to have information - objective in-
formation. And so we need to defend the far-
mers. 
 
Jaime ORTIZ-CAÑAVATE 
I don’t think we have mentioned the European 
community machinery directive, which states 
that the industry has to make a self-certification 
of the machines they manufacture. So I think on 
task of the testing stations is to help the industry 
with this self-certification. And that will maybe 
lead to competition among the different testing 
stations, to help manufacturers achieve this go-
al.