Imagine a world where shoe sizes were not standardized, or where golf balls came in a variety of sizes and weights. What if your favorite CDs didn’t fit in your friend’s CD player?

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) colleagues of Dan Shechtman, Ph.D., joined others in the scientific community in congratulating him on winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

American National Standards Institute (ANSI) president and CEO, S. Joe Bhatia, has advice for U.S. companies on a topic we don’t often see in the news.

A series of groundbreaking case studies by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and partner organizations shows that implementing standards can provide economic benefits from between 0.5 and 4 percent of companies’ annual sales revenues.

Manufacturing and metrology leaders have announced a new certification body establishing performance standards for service providers and equipment manufacturers in the rapidly expanding digital metrology industry.

Six Sigma, a data-driven method for improving business and quality performance, has been published as a two-part standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Any improvement effort ultimately faces the issue of standardizing processes, in many cases under the intense pressure of an impending certification audit.

Because many organizations are trying for formal certification, the pressure is on to standardize and document processes. This is also true for any robust improvement effort.

Management system standards trace their beginnings to the use of simple preventive practices that were developed and used at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

In part one of this two-part article, we looked at the history of management system standards.