I've never gone through that process. Anyone know ballpark costs for certifications?
Of course the way it's meant to work is that your company hires an approval company that knows a lot about certifications, tests the product and then approves it knowing that they're on the hook if it doesn't meet requirements and regulations.
Nowhere does it say that the approving company can't be the same company as the one making the product, so basically we bought a few CE stickers put them on the product and it was approved. By us.
* The product may be placed on the market only if it complies with the provisions of all applicable directives and if the conformity assessment procedure has been carried out accordingly.
* If stipulated in the directive(s), an authorized third party (Notified Body) must be involved in the conformity assessment procedure.
I'm not sure if the machine directive stipulates it, but "authorized third party" seems to imply that the manufacturer can't perform the certification themselves.
Even if you can count yourself as the approving company, did you make sure that your product complies with all the provisions? Or were you taking advantage of some loophole somewhere to skip the entire process?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking
EDIT: I see that you mentioned this was 15 years ago, so I'm mostly curious for historical reasons.
The "If stipulated" part seems to be the key. Below your quotes in the wikipedia entry there is a section that covers self-certification. While it doesn't list the directives comprehensively, the steps there do seem to indicate that self-certification is not unanticipated.
One of the reasons the test houses exist is that not everyone wants to assume the responsibility of self certification and so they outsource it to experts in the test industry.
The most important thing to make sure, regardless of the route you choose, is to always have your certifications and technical documents to hand should one of the monitoring bodies ask for it
Granted, we have intentional radiators (like wifi radios, cellular modems) in our products so it may be more expensive. YMMV of course.
Edit: with the comment by thomaslangston, I should clarify that the included radios already had their own FCC certifications; this was just Part 15 for the whole device.
"Agency Compliance and You: An Introduction for Small Manufacturers of OSHW" -- <http://summit.oshwa.org/agency-compliance-and-you-an-introdu...;
Slides: <http://summit.oshwa.org/schedule/oshws_presentation_fcc/>;
They don't seem to have the edited video online yet but you can look at the schedule <http://summit.oshwa.org/schedule/>; to find the session in the recorded live stream: <http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ohs2012>;