Introduction Case Study 7: Descriptive practice-oriented research

standards do not meet all their needs and, therefore, they complement these with their own standards, “company standards”. In this research project, five big Dutch chemical and petrochemical companies Akzo Nobel, DSM, Gasunie, NAM, and Shell, later joined by Dow Chemical, agreed with our suggestion that research could help them to improve their own standardization performance by describ- ing, evaluating, and comparing the standardization activities in each of these companies. The main objectives of this research project were 1 to design a “best practice” for company standardization that could be implemented in the six companies participating in the project, and by doing this 2 to contribute to the general body of knowledge of company standardization. Case Study 7 will focus on the first practice-oriented objective. This research was conducted by a research team, supported by a steering group consisting of the standardization managers of the com- panies, a senior standardization consultant of the Dutch national stan- dards body NEN, and the president of the NKN, the organization of Dutch standards users.

11.4.2 Absence of guidelines or criteria

A “best practice” is a practice that is in actual use at a place and that is deemed better than all other practices that are used or known else- where. If a practice is acknowledged as “best”, it should be fit for being transferred to those other places as well. Assessing which of the prac- tices in use is the best requires that appropriate criteria be used to evalu- ate current practices. Which criteria should be used to assess which shaping of standardization is the best? Although the number of company standards outweighs the number of other standards to a large extent, this relative importance is not reflected in the literature on standardization. The few studies of company stan- dards Susanto, 1988; Schacht, 1991; Adolphi, 1997; Hesser and Inklaar, 1997 Section 5; De Vries, 1999 Chapter 14; Rada and Craparo, 2001 are descriptive rather than prescriptive, and do not address the question of how to maximize the benefits of company standardization. Therefore, we could not apply an extant theoretical framework. The companies themselves had no criteria for good standardization practice either. Types of standards and their goals differed widely, both within and between companies. The two main types of standardization in these companies concerned their products approximately 10 per cent of the amount of standards and their installations 90 per cent. Chapter 11 Standards for chemical products include mainly standards that specify requirements for these products and standards that describe methods to test them. Standards for installations primarily concern engineering solu- tions that define how to design, construct, and maintain manufacturing facilities Simpkins, 2001. Regarding aims of standards, the main aim of a safety standard might be zero accidents, whereas the main aim of a standard that specifies a preference range for pipes might be cost savings. Because each of these standards should be evaluated on its own terms, it is not possible to use one general criterion for ascertaining the quality of standards in a company. For this reason, we decided that the best practice that should be developed in this study would not be based on criteria for the quality of the products of the standardization process the company standards themselves but rather on process criteria. A study of the available scientific and professional literature on the process of designing company standards confirmed the expectation that criteria for a good quality process were not available. Such criteria, therefore, as well as the “best” practices related to them, should be “dis- covered” in this study. Each of the companies was visited in order personally to meet the company’s standardization officer and get a first overview of the com- pany’s standardization practices. How was standardization defined in that company? What did the company do in this area, and how and why? The character of this first meeting was more like a chat than an interview. It was unstructured in order to be able to explore the com- pany’s situation without any preconceived ideas. It can also be seen as a “quick scan” of company standardization in that company. Partially based on this initial information about the standardization processes in our companies and partially based on the process model of innovation as developed by Chiesa et al. 1996, we developed a process model of company standardization. This model made a distinction between four core processes and four supporting processes see Figure 11.2. Core processes 1. Prioritizing. Which company standard will be developed and which will not? Who decides, based on which criteria if any? 2. Company standard development. This process consists of the composition of draft versions of the standard, commentary rounds, the writing of the final version, and its approval. 3. Company standard introduction. The approved standard must be introduced to its users. In this introduction process, the ben- efits of the standard and the reasons for certain choices in the