Standardization infrastructure worldwide

  

Nowadays there are millions of people who work every day with the aim, among many others, of complying with standards. In particular, those of us who carry out our professional activities in organizations that use a standardized management system are oriented to meet one or more requirements of one of these standards.

For this reason, I am presenting some information regarding the standardization infrastructure, since it is from certain organizations that develop this activity where the standards with which we work arise.

To start with this issue, it is important to mention that we basically have five levels of standards, with which we can be working:

·       Company level

·       Association level

·       National level

·       Regional level

·       International level

 

The company standardization is undoubtedly the most important level of standards, since it is in which internal order can be generated and obtain some leadership at the technological level, in elements of competitiveness, economy, reliability, among other aspects. It is when an organization, or a small group of organizations, establishes standards to be applied by that organization, or that exclusive group, with stricter specifications than those that meet most organizations with which they compete in the market. This level is where the standardization activity originally began. I think it is important to mention this, since if you read this in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and some other European countries, you may see this as something logical and common, but for those who read this in Mexico, Latin America, and many countries in Asia and Africa, you can see it as something strange, since in many countries the standardization activity began as a government control activity over their national industry, confusing it with governmental technical regulations, and in some of them the standardization activity at this company level, practically does not exist.

The next level of standards is that of association, which is when a group of specialists within the same industrial sector propose a standard with specifications with strict specifications but that can be applied by an important segment of the companies that make up that industrial sector. This level is very important in the United States but it is very little used in the rest of the world, but the activity of several of these North American associations is carried out with the participation of specialists from many countries.

The national standard level is when a relevant part of companies from the same industrial sector agree to establish standards with specifications that are validated as a minimum acceptable level of that industry at the national level. Logically, the national level specifications are less strict than most specifications at the company or association level and it would be, with exceptions, unacceptable that there were less strict company specifications than the national level, because it would mean that a company would be out of competition in its national market, although in certain cases it could lead to less competitive foreign markets.

The regional level is when a group of countries with common market interests, establish minimum acceptable specifications for the markets between those countries. Also by simple logical reasoning, the specifications of a regional standard would generally be less strict than most national standards of the countries belonging to that group of countries.

The international level of standardization is when representatives of countries from practically all over the world agree to establish specifications that are acceptable to most of the countries that participate in those organizations, in their commercial exchanges. That is why, applying the same logical sense, international standards establish less strict specifications than regional standards and still less than national ones.

 

Standardization Levels, taken from the following website: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265263634_A_Brief_History_of_Standards_and_Standardization_Organizations_A_Chinese_Perspective/link/58aed82392851cf7ae88bfe7 (Seen on date: 2019/06/15).

 

It is important to analyse this scheme, since it is still common that there are countries whose national standards organizations are considered satisfied when they achieve that their national standards are technically identical to the international ones, which would endanger their local productive sectors, since it leads to lose competitiveness.

There are some clear cases in which this differentiation between levels of standards does not apply, as would be the case of internationally recognized metrological standards and international codes, since these should be applied at all levels, and in the case of management system standards, so since that the family of ISO 9000 standards was generated, it was internationally agreed that the national standards that were generated on these systems should not have differences in terms of their technical elements. Therefore, almost all over the world, management system standards are technically identical to those issued by ISO.

Having mentioned this, if you analyse and compare the development of standardization in Mexico, as in practically all of Latin America, with that of this activity at the level of the leading countries worldwide, you will realize that in this we have worked almost the other way around and that in slow motion. The schemes of organized standardization, from the industrial revolution, began to be generated within the companies that wished to work in an orderly manner. Mainly, the companies worked the standardization as far as the uniformity of dimensions and the interchangeability of parts, to continue with the essential schemes of the standardization like the unification, simplification and modularization in the designs of products, of processes and of manufacture.

In order to facilitate communication and greater participation of companies and their specialists in these activities, some specialized associations were created to support, among others, this activity, such as the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in the United Kingdom in 1818, North American Associations of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 1881 or of Test Materials (ASTM) in 1898, among many others, and to provide adequate support for the unification and commercial strength of industries nationwide, as well as legal and regulatory for these activities were created national standardization organizations, such as the National Bureau of Standards (USA) and the Engineering Standards Committee (United Kingdom), in 1901, predecessors of both the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA), as of the British Standards Institute. Between 1917 and 1932, the national standards bodies of Germany (DIN), another of the USA, the ANSI, were established as a private entity, since the NBS / NIST is of the governmental type, of France (precursor to AFNOR), Belgium (precursor of the BIN), Austria (precursor of the ON), Italy (UNI), Sweden (SIS), Norway (NSF), Russia (GOST R), Japan (JISC) and China (INNC).

Thomas Telford - First President of ICE

(Taken from the ICE site (ice.org.uk)

The next step was the use of the rules for the facilitation of international trade, so some international standards organizations were created, such as the ITU in 1865 in its original version of the International Telegraphy Union, and 1932, in its current version of International Telecommunications Union, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), in 1906, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), in 1947 and the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), in 1962. In these cases, the first three are of non-governmental nature, and the last one, the CAC, is of a governmental nature, created within the UN, since it is a joint program of FAO and WHO.

The last important step in the development of the infrastructure that we now have in this area was the creation of regional standards bodies, which cover groups of countries with common interests or characteristics, a phenomenon that occurred between the sixties and eighties of the Last century, when the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC) of countries were created bordering the Pacific Ocean, of which Mexico is a member, the Pan American Technical Standards Commission (COPANT) of the American continent, which was founded on July 12, 1949, but began its work in April 1961 and of which Mexico is also a member, the Advisory Committee on Standards and Quality (ACCSQ) of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Arab Industrial Development and Mining Organization (AIDMO) of Arab countries and the Euro-Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification (EASC).

I have exposed this information, and all this historical scheme, in addition to the relevance that this development has for itself, so that it can also serve as a basis for comparison with the way in which we have developed our support and infrastructure for standardization in Mexico, which by the way it has a lot of similarities to what happened in many countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, and I will be telling you in the next post.

 

Author:

Ernesto Palomares Hilton