KEEPING PACE WITH STANDARDS

HOW NEW WORKFLOW STRATEGIES ARE HELPING

ORGANIZATIONS STAY CURRENT WITH CHANGING STANDARDS

ASTM: WORKFLOW IMPROVEMENT

STANDARDS:

CONSTANTLY EVOLVING
AND CHANGING.
Standards form the fundamental building blocks of product
development, by establishing consistent protocols that can be
universally understood and adopted. This helps organizations
worldwide ensure compatibility, simplify product development,
and speed time-to-market.
Whats more, as standards are globally adopted and applied,
they also fuel international trade by providing markets with:

Safety and reliability

Support of government policies and legislation

Interoperability, and

Consumer choice

Most importantly, using standards both establishing them and

incorporating them into the regular workflow of your organization
(in research and development, product design and manufacturing,
quality control, and business partnerships) establishes a true
competitive advantage for your organization. By embedding
standards into the workflow of your organization, you can:

Open up market access

Provide economies of scale

Encourage innovation

Increase credibility and reliability

Advance technical developments and initiatives

Henry Troemner, LLC. Headquarters

The importance of standards to Henry Troemner, LLC.

Troemner is a manufacturer of precision weights and laboratory
equipment and a provider of calibration services for mass, pipettes,
temperature, pressure, humidity, thermal mass flow, electrical,
dimensional, time and frequency devices.
The accuracy of Troemners instruments is essential for critical
requirements: Every tenth of a degree in super-heated gas turbine steam
can potentially cost millions of dollars. Accurate volume measurements
are critical for DNA experiments and measuring the milligrams of a drug
in prescription medications can mean the difference between an accurate
and inaccurate dosage.

Because we follow the ASTM

standard, our customers can be
confident that they are receiving a
quality product, and our marketing
team promotes our products strict
adherence to that standard.
Tracy Hill, Henry Troemner LLC

ASTM | WORKFLOW IMPROVEMENT

03

THE CHALLENGE:

KEEPING PACE WITH

STANDARDS IS RESOURCE
AND TIME-INTENSIVE.
Keeping pace with standards is a multi-layered challenge.
Not only do organizations need to keep up with changes
to standards, but the race to keep pace also involves
understanding these changes, ensuring the proper application
of standards, and sharing (and passing along) knowledge across
the enterprise.
Without properly understanding and applying standards, your
organization can face compliance and quality control issues,
while also missing opportunities to establish and maintain a
competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Standards are constantly changing:

some 40% of standards are updated
on an annual basis.

Add issues of regional and international trade and language, and

the race to keep pace becomes even more challenging.

ASTM | WORKFLOW IMPROVEMENT

04

Are you keeping pace with changing standards? Are you using
antiquated methods where updates and workflow are concerned?
Many organizations have shared the painstaking methods they use to
keep pace with changing technology and standards. These include:
Tracking

updates through unreliable public sources

Purchasing

and sharing multiple copies of standards

and publications

Manually

comparing and highlighting changes in versions

of standards

Consulting

corporate knowledge centers that are updated

erratically and anecdotally at best

If youre employing any of these tactics, its likely youre lacking the
knowledge, expertise, and resources you need to make your company
the best it can be.
But you can easily reverse this trend.

ASTM | WORKFLOW IMPROVEMENT

05

THE UNSEEN COST OF

MAINTAINING STANDARDS

Training inexperienced staff on

the use of standards and taking
senior people off-task while they
handle training

Knowledge leakage as
experience is not properly passed
down from experienced staff
down to junior staff or new hires

Using staff to redline manuals;

practicing version control with a
ruler and marker

Opportunities lost through a slowdown in speed and performance

within the organization

Potential quality problems (and

potential lawsuits) if you dont
keep up with the latest safety and
quality standards

Poor performance of your

products/services, which results
in a costly brand perception
problem

ASTM | WORKFLOW IMPROVEMENT

06

THE SOLUTION:

NEW WEB-BASED TOOLS CAN

DELIVER BREAKTHROUGH
WORKFLOW IMPROVEMENTS.
Today, using new web-based tools, standards can be
managed and maintained, with much more speed and
efficiency than ever before. Your staff can be educated
and up-to-date with 24/7 online access to comprehensive
technical information; everyone can have all of the access
they need to the relevant information they need to
effectively do their jobs.
The newest web-based tool available from ASTM
International, ASTM Compass, provides a powerful interface
that enables your staff to log into one platform and access all
of its ASTM standards and Standards and Engineering Digital
Library content, as well as other services.

This enterprise-wide license enables your organization to gain

a number of efficiencies:
Access a broader array of contentproviding a deeper
knowledge of industry standards

Quickly identify changes to standards via redlined standards

Eliminate the need to track and purchase revisions to standards
due to automatic sharing and updating of online content
Consolidate, share, and retain corporate knowledge with
annotations and sharing features
Access to past and present standards provides full
understanding of industry growth and changes
Consult and maintain a single repository of critical
information by uploading corporate documents

Improve and measure performance through training

ASTM | WORKFLOW IMPROVEMENT

07

BENEFITS OF AN ONLINE
STANDARDS PORTAL
Using its streamlined platform and taxonomy (available in Spanish, Portuguese
and Russian, in addition to English), ASTM Compass accelerates your ability to:
Search,

find and use content

Download,

print and compare that content

Bookmark,

annotate and share content

Access

training, translations, video and more

A valuable Version Comparison button displays the current and most recent
versions and conveniently color-codes the differences.
An enterprise portal like ASTM Compass is also extremely valuable to protecting
the investment made in your own institutional knowledge and ensures continuity.
As older-generation workers begin to retire, their knowledge and experience
can be preserved and passed down to the next generation.

Its helpful to be able to perform a search and find the

standard you are looking for quickly. A secondary feature
that is helpful is to see all of the standards that might
reference the one you are looking for.
Beth Mayo-Yurek, Quality Management/Quality Engineer, Granite Construction

ASTM | WORKFLOW IMPROVEMENT

ASTM: EXPERTLY DRIVEN

ASTM International is a globally recognized leader in the development
and delivery of international voluntary consensus standards. Today,
some 12,000 ASTM standards are used around the world to improve
product quality, enhance safety, facilitate market access and trade,
and build consumer confidence. ASTMs leadership in international
standards development is driven by the contributions of its members:
more than 30,000 of the worlds top technical experts and business
professionals representing 150 countries.
ASTM touches every part of everyday life. Were a constant in the evergrowing, globally connected marketplace. The ASTM team of experts
identifies, sets and constantly improves the relevant, high quality
technical standards by which everyone operates.
Our mission is to help your world work better ensuring the products
and services you offer and the world relies on, meet the highest levels
of performance, quality and responsibility.

Learn how ASTM can help you get expertly

driven through the power of standards.
For more information, visit
astm.org/compass, email sales@astm.org
or call 1.877.909.ASTM.