Senior Consultant, Chris Mallinson, outlines the important role that recognised and trusted standards play.
What document do you go to when you want a reliable and trusted process? Hopefully high on the list is a standard, be it a British Standard (BS), an ISO from the International Organization for Standardization, from the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) or possibly a Defence Standard (DS).
We regularly make use of standards in our work, to guide and inform client projects. Keeping these vital documents up to date involves a continuous process of review and revision. Frazer-Nash has worked with some of the institutions that maintain these standards, and has been trusted to review, update and in some cases even to rewrite them. Why are we trusted to do this? Well, we have evaluated over 100 standards in recent years, building a wealth of experience in robust methods to examine new data and to agree pathways for updates.
Updating standards requires our experts to be meticulous in their methods. All changes require full auditability, and any decisions regarding modifications to the technical content must be presented to a committee for endorsement prior to inclusion.
We have identified standards that are no longer required because they are overtaken by events, refer to out of date practices, or because there are other standards available that adequately describe their content. Where this is found to be the case, we work with the sponsor of the standard to ensure that it is agreed obsolete, working to withdraw the standard with reference to an alternative if required. The removal of out-of-date standards benefits both sponsors and users, by reducing the document maintenance burden and ensuring users are always supplied with industry best practice.