Abstract
The main NSO services relate to developing and issuing common standards and providing information about them. From a company’s point of view this does not cover all aspects of standardization, because a company itself may also create standards. Company standardization is standardization at the company level. It includes developing standards for use within the company (internal standardization), and developing standards to be used in the company’s relations with its direct business partners. A company standard may have the form of:
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a reference to one or more external standards officially adopted by the company;
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a company modification of an external standard;
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a subsets of an external standard (for instance, a description of the company’s choice of competing possibilities offered in an external standard, or a subset of the topics covered in the external standard);
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a standard reproduced from (parts of) other external documents, for instance, suppliers documents;
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a self-written standard.
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References
For instance, Adolphi (1996), AFNOR (1967), Barnes et al. (1988), DIN Deutsches Institut für Normung (1991b), Düsterbeck & Hesser (1997), Toth (1990).
The author interviewed representatives of national standards user organizations in Austria, Canada/United States of America, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom during the 7th IFAN conference Standards, Quality and World Markets in Strasbourg, 1992. The investigation results were not published.
Adolphi (1997) provides different models for organizing company standardization.
A thorough examination of variety reduction is presented by Meyer (1995). An example of “standardization without standards” is provided by Sumner (1981, p. 17).
Akzo Nobel, DAF, DSM, Gasunie, NAM and Shell.
Adolphi means New Approach Directives, see Subsection 2.2.5. There are many other EU directives.
The contents of this section are based on the author’s experiences. Where possible, reference to other resources is mentioned. The fi1ndings have been confi1rmed in a discussion with representatives of standardization departments in six large Dutch companies: Akzo Nobel, DAF, DSM, Gasunie, NAM, and Shell.
Information on this topic is to be found in, among other sources, British Standards Society (1995, pp. 37–42), Feier (1995) and Hesser (1997a). An example of a company’s standardization strategy is offered by Teal (1990), who describes the strategy of Du Pont.
A simple test is described in Rationalisierung durch Werknormung [Rationalization by Company Standardization] (Wirtschaftsförderungsinstitut der Bundeskammer, 1976, pp. 18–19). For quality management based on ISO 9000 standards and environmental management based on ISO 14000 standards, “audit diskettes” are available that provide insight into the extent to which the firm already complies with the requirements laid down in the standards. In a similar way, a “standardization audit diskette” might be developed.
See British Standards Society (1995, Chapter 6) and Verstege (1995).
An example of this is the software NNI provides to support implementation of its standard graphical symbols for electrotechnology (Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut, 1991a). A set of diskettes contains all 1986 symbols in a format that enables them to be integrated in all available Computer Aided Design software. Other examples are the above mentioned audit diskettes for ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 implementation, and templates or software as a help for drawing flow charts.
More information on standards administration: British Standards Society (1995, Sections 5.6 — 5.8), Gooskens & De Vries (1994) and Van Werven (1997).
Presented in an easy way by Simons & De Vries (1997, Section 4.2) and far more advanced by Bongers (1980).
An example of this is DIN 4000 Sachmerkmal-Leisten [Tabular layouts of article characteristics] (see DIN Deutsches Institut für Normung, 1991 c).
Biesheuvel, Verkuyl & De Vries (1993, p. 12) call this the task-directed model, in which different standardization tasks are carried out by different people, or different departments.
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de Vries, H.J. (1999). Services Related to Company Standardization. In: Standardization: A Business Approach to the Role of National Standardization Organizations. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3042-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3042-5_14
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