Best Practice In Company Standardisation

Though the majority of standards are company standards, scientific standardisation literature pays hardly any attention to them. In this paper we describe results from a research project on company standardisation (Oly & Slob, 1999). The researchers investigated six chemical and petrochemical industries in the Netherlands: Akzo Nobel, Dow Chemical, DSM, Gasunie, NAM and Shell. These companies have numerous standards for their installations. Best practice for developing such standards was developed by examining the companies and using insights from relevant literature. This paper describes the scientific approach used and some of the best practice results.