Standards Update 9-21-98

September 21, 1998 Design News

STANDARDS UPDATE Technical news from around the world

Countries sign pact to generate world guidelines for safe autos

Walter Wingo, Standards Editor

All members of the United Nations are being asked to sign an agreement to develop global regulations for the safe performance of motor vehicles and motor-vehicle equipment and parts. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe sponsors the undertaking. Representatives from Japan, the European Communities, and the U.S. in March wrote the text for the agreement, and those countries formally signed on this summer. All stakeholders will be given ample opportunities to comment on candidate standards at each stage of their development. The auto standards committees are to meet in open sessions in Geneva. For details, write the Director of International Harmonization, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 400 Seventh Street SW, Washington, DC 20590.

Europeans drafting overhaul of standards for aerospace

European agencies are working to give international status to a large part of the engineering and management documents of the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS). They are supported by a mandate from the European Commission. ECSS is drafting documents for project management, and safety for space programs and engineering. The group will first submit the documents to the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) for publication as European standards. They are to complement standards prepared by the European Association of Aerospace Industries, an arm of CEN. For details, contact Hugues Plissart, CEN's deputy director for standards programs. FAX +32 2 550 08 19, or e-mail him at [email protected] .

New secretariat to be picked for product-data exchange

A different organization will take over the job of guiding the evolution of STEP, the global Standard for the Exchange of Product model data. For the past 14 years, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has filled the role. NIST officials no longer want their agency to be the secretariat for the Subcommittee on Industrial Data of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Rather, they want NIST to shift from administering manufacturing and enterprise integration standards and focus instead on technical contributions to those standards. NIST performed much of the manufacturing research that led to STEP, a universal language for exchanging product information among computers. ISO officially adopted STEP as ISO 10303 in 1994. Major automotive and aerospace manufacturers have adopted STEP-based technologies and are spreading them to their supply chains. The American National Standards Institute, the U.S. member of ISO, is expected to choose a successor secretariat by October 1999. For more information, phone NIST experts Lisa Phillips at (301) 975-5021 or Steven Ray at (301) 975-3524.

U.S. companies expand protest over harmonic emission limits

Several American industries are combining forces for a further assault on plans by the European Community to impose additional limits on harmonic emissions fed back into power lines. Earlier, U.S. delegations succeeded in obtaining a four-year moratorium on the limits, as well as an interim acceptance of a proposed U.S. revision to them. The Americans are using the interlude to gather more facts to support their claim that the proposed limits are overly stringent and will shut European markets for a vast range of electrical, electronic, and telecommunications products that meet U.S. and Canadian standards. The limits are part of the Electromagnetic Compatibility Standard of the International Electrotechnical Commission based in Geneva. The Electronics Industries Association (EIA), based in Washington, has formed a coalition of several large American trade associations. For details, e-mail Jean-Paul Emard, EIA's staff vice president for standards and technology, at [email protected] .

ISO 9000 users to test-drive revised quality standards

Major changes are coming late in the year 2000 to the ISO 9000 series of standards for quality management. The revisions promise to be so sweeping that ISO plans to let about 100 organizations in different countries try out draft versions next year. The organizations will report by November 1999 on whether or not the changes have helped them improve their business results. The test-drive is a novel approach for ISO. Usually, user input is limited to a cross-section of experts from stakeholder groups who help draft documents in technical committees. ISO then circulates the documents to its whole membership for comments and voting. That procedure was used for the first publication of the ISO 9000 series in 1987, and again for a light revision in 1994. The forthcoming changes, being drafted by ISO's technical committee 176, will affect the ISO 9001 standard, which covers design, and ISO 9004, which includes services.