How technical standards are developed for global engineering and manufacturing organizations

This paper explores how corporations can choose technical standards used throughout its organization. A methodology for choosing the standard is introduced. It is based on the methods that professional standards organizations use to create new standards for industries. The steps to choose an external standard as well as create new internal standards are consensus, development, approvals, and maintenance. Questions about standards from Applied Materials are answered: what technical standard should be used for engineering drawings, should the company use metric units, what tolerance scheme should be used, and how are standards chosen when a merger or acquisition is performed? Applied Materials should use the ASME Y14.5M-1994 standard. The move to metric should be done if the customers request it. Simple parts and complex assemblies should not be toleranced the same way. When mergers and acquisitions are done, the consensus, development, approval, and maintenance method should be used to choose which standards should be used.