Digital Standards Systems—An Integrated Approach to Engineering Standards Usage

Industry standards are key enablers in helping businesses around the meet regulatory requirements, keep costs down, gain market access, and instill consumer confidence. SAE International, a standards development organization (SDO) critical to the transportation industry, works in partnership with industry to develop and distribute standards important in automotive and aerospace product development, product performance, and quality management. Historically, industry standards were formatted with the intention of being distributed in print. This changed with the evolution of new electronic formats, and now most standards are available in PDF or EPUB. While progressive at the time, these formats are now proving inadequate due their optimization for readability by the human eye versus consumption by electronic endpoints. As new technologies develop to better integrate standards into engineering workflows, the necessary changes will not likely follow a linear trajectory, but rather incorporate an interconnected systems-level approach (Figure 1). This paper will review the key considerations in the development of a digital standards system.