Many people are unsure of how to work out the date of manufacture on a piece of their PPE or other equipment, and in turn, are unaware of the date the product needs to be retired. So, we thought we would give you a few tips on how you would find this out with some of the main manufacturers; take a look at our equipment manufacturers and import equipment from our PPE Directory.
Many of these companies such as Petzl will use a mixture of calendar and technical based information to make up their equipment serial numbers in order to help you identify the creation date. Essentially, this system comprises of YY/DDD with other company-specific data for control/batch/serial number etc.
For example, if we take a serial number of 14125****** this would tell us that it was manufactured in 2014 on the 125th day of the year, this was 5th May.
If you have equipment with serial numbers set out in this format follow this link that will help you work out when they were manufactured and most importantly when they may need to be retired too. It is essential that any business using PPE knows when their piece of kit needs to be taken out of use for safety and legal reasons.
Papertrail’s easy record-keeping software allows you to set the retire date of your piece of equipment as per the manufacturer’s guidance, whether this is 10 years or 5 years. Once this has been inputted, you will get reminders leading up to this date so you don’t have to panic and go searching for this information elsewhere.
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