About Standards Boost Business

What can standards do for my organization, my members, and my industry?

By participating in standards development activities that affect your products and services – and by implementing standards and conformance tools that can help you streamline your processes and trim costs – your company can continue to build market share and boost your bottom line.

Why should my staff spend company time on standards development?

When your employees participate in standards-setting work, your company automatically gets a leg up on emerging issues and obstacles that affect your industry or product line.

You’ll gain insider knowledge and early access to information that will help you shape your agenda, develop networks, and act on priority areas.

On almost any given day, a standards group or technical committee is meeting and making decisions that could affect your business. Shouldn’t you and your members be involved?

But isn’t it expensive to participate?

In challenging economic times, some executives decide to downsize or even eliminate their organization’s standards development efforts. What they don’t realize is that re-starting their internal processes later can be much more expensive and time consuming than maintaining a well-functioning system.

The companies who are most successful in their sectors recognize that standards and conformance are business tools that should be managed right alongside their quality, safety, and environmental policies.

What’s the worst that could happen?

If the U.S. private sector does not step forward to develop a standards and conformance solution to a key national priority, then the U.S. government will meet that need with a regulation.

And from a market share point of view, it’s likely that your competitors are actively engaged in standardization. Without your influence and input, your competitors can dictate the way you will be doing business through the content of a standard. Worse yet, they can even include language that effectively standardizes your product off the market.

What should I do?

Make a resource commitment – time, money, and manpower – to the U.S. standardization system. Read case studies of how other companies and organizations are relying on strategic standardization, and demonstrate your support by signing the Standards Boost Business pledge.

Beyond the bottom line: standards impact quality, lead-time, factory flexibility, and supply chain management.

Standardization and conformity assessment activities lead to lower costs by reducing redundancy, minimizing errors, and reducing time to market.

Demonstrating compliance to standards helps your products, services, and personnel to cross borders. Standards also make cross-border interoperability possible, ensuring that products manufactured in one country can be sold and used in another.

Businesses not only reduce the economic risk of their research and development activities by participating in standardization, they can also lower their overall R&D costs by relying on previously standardized technologies and terminologies.