Reasons of Standardisation

• Suppose you buy jeans of waist size, say 36. After reaching home and trying to wear it, you may find it is too loose, even though your waist size is exactly 36 inches.
• A person buys an electric plug, on reaching home, he finds it does not fit the socket.
• A repairman on a service call goes to the machine with along with tools and expected spares but may find the tools are fitting correctly to open the machine or the spares are not compatible.

All these are simple examples of non-standardisation that usually occur in our day-to-day life. Imagine a situation that there are no standard sizes of garments and shoes, standard sizes of books and magazines, standard traffic signals and road signs, standard forms used by business organizations, ball pen refills, etc. our daily life becomes very difficult. Thus, standardisation of products, methods, processes, activities etc. is very much necessary to make the life much easier and simpler.

Standardisation is applied to two distinct areas in industry:

• Standardisation of products-their shape, dimensions, colour, physical and chemical properties, etc. This is industrial standardisation.
• Standardisation of business practices-of forms, procedures, systems, operating practices etc. This is managerial standardisation.

The standardisation process may take the form of a document containing a set of conditions to be fulfilled, a fundamental unit or physical constant or an object for physical comparison. The apex body of standards in India is the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), formerly known as the Indian Standard Institution (ISI) and at the international level, International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), Geneva.