Some Spanish Approaches on Standardization Management: Discussion of the Experiences With University Students and Collaboration With Spanish Industry

Introduction

In order to get the conditions under which the Spanish Standardization grew, It is necessary to have a look at the history. Briefly (“UNE History”, n.d.), we have the following:

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  1935 Creation of the Spanish Standardization Body.

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  1939 First UNE Standard (paper formats based in DIN)

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  1946 The Instituto Nacional de Racionalización en el Trabajo (IRATRA) is founded. This was renamed in 1971 as Instituto Nacional de Racionalización y Normalización (IRANOR).

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  1986 Creation of the Certification and Standardization Body, AENOR.

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  1987 AENOR assumed the representation of Spain in ISO, IEC, CEN y COPANT

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  1987 Publication of the first UNE Standard by AENOR (UNE 36137:1987: Continuously hot-dip zinc coated unalloyed structural steel sheet and strip technical delivery conditions.)

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  1990 The Standardization Body assumed the representation of Spain in CENELEC

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  1990 First big international cooperation project (European Project in Mexico)

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  1999 The Centro de Ensayos, Innovación y Servicios S.L. (CEIS) is created.

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  2001 Creation of AENOR Internacional S.A.U.

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  2017 The Spanish Standardization Body, UNE, changes its denomination.

ISO started its work in 1947, one year before had the Spanish IRANOR, but their scope were not the same. Looking at the recent history, Spain increased its professionals from the 60’s. Before that time, most of the economy was based on agriculture and some official industries, like SEAT, with a huge influence from the outside. Therefore, the lack of educated people and the fact that the standards came from the Mother Industry, was the background of Spain.

The work done between 1946 and 1976 approximately was focused into spreading the standards into the industry, educating people for allowing the industry to grow. They tried to gather to share knowledge, but there was also another problem. Not many people speak other languages from Spanish. This isolated the standardization members of the Committee. But with the 70’s and the political collaboration with other countries, Spain started to be more open. People started to study languages. They had now the opportunity to learn from their European colleagues and they did. AENOR was created in 1986 and immediately Spain started to participate directly in ISO, IEC, CEN … From 1987, when AENOR started in ISO, the Spanish Standardization Committees grew quite fast until now.

So we could say that the Standardization in Spain, as a task assumed to be relevant with an important implication in international committees, is not older than 35 years.

Among all the Standardization Committees in UNE (former AENOR), we would like to talk about the story of one of them, the AEN/CTN 82 on Metrology (Saenz-Nuno, 2003; Saenz et al, 2011). It was established from the very beginning due the needs in military institutions. They started to collect Good Practices in the Industry and developing new National Documents, most of them based on Military ones.

In 1996 the ISO standardization committee on Geometrical Product Specification and Verification, ISO/TC 213 (Marcos et al, 2012) was created. Things started to change. In the Spanish committee, AEN/CTN 82, it was decided to have a new leadership to converge faster to the International current and then is when Dr. Sáenz-Nuño, author of this chapter, together with another Professor of the Comillas Pontifical University, assumed the Technical Secretary because of her experience as researcher in the National Metrology Institution, CEM.

This Standardization Committee on Geometrical Product Specification and Verification, AEN/CTN 82/SC 2 has been developing a great effort during the past 20 years.