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By using SMART standards, companies can potentially increase their turnover by up to 60 percent – the degree of digitization of the company and the standards provided play a decisive role here. DIN and DKE established this in conjunction with the Digital Standards Initiative (IDiS). They examined how the use of SMART standards affects a company’s process quality, product quality and sales potential and what influence they have on employees or the organization. The results showed that the time required is significantly reduced. The workload of employees is also reduced, allowing them to concentrate on other tasks. Material costs can be roughly halved, while the number of orders processed can even be doubled in the best-case scenario.  

The application and use of standards has so far required many manual individual steps. The information from the relevant standard must be recorded by humans to a large extend, extracted and transferred to other systems and transferred to other systems. In the process, many documents have to be researched, procured and read. In addition, employees have to assess which standards and information are specifically relevant for the respective company and product. Behind and between each of these process steps, there is also the risk of an information transfer error that could affect the entire process chain and therefore a product in all its facets (safety, security, performance, costs and therefore market acceptance) can be affected. 

Example of product development in a medium-sized company 

This effort can be reduced cost-effectively if the standards are made available and supported by digital services that require SMART standards. Among other things, process times can be shortened and legal certainty in the company’s application of standards can be improved by using IT to ensure that the application of standards is complete, up-to-date, correct, free of redundancy and compliant. The experts from DIN and DKE demonstrate this using the example of product development in a medium-sized mechanical engineering company.  

Potential increase in turnover of between 32 and 60 percent  

In the scenarios considered, SMART standards can process between 50 and almost 100 percent more orders with the same number of staff. The costs clearly show the volume of personnel and material costs that may be incurred in the application of standards in the company each year and that an annual cost reduction of between just under 50 and around 65 percent would be possible with a transformation. In addition, the increase in turnover is between 32 and 60 percent.  

DKE Managing Director Michael Teigeler: “With this white paper, we show that SMART standards ultimately also pay off for a company in business terms. As a result, management should no longer perceive standards solely as a cost factor. They are a decisive competitive advantage and driver of innovation. SMART standards help to strengthen Germany as a business location.”  

Christoph Winterhalter, CEO of DIN: “For the first time ever, our white paper examines the extent to which companies derive economic benefits from making the content of standards available digitally – in terms of not just quality, but also quantity. This is an indicator of how worthwhile it is for companies to invest in digital infrastructure, which can significantly increase the potential for the use of standards.” 

The 3rd IDiS whitepaper The business benefits of SMART standards (German version) is available to download here.