Implementing an industry standards subscription can significantly benefit your organization by ensuring engineers, testers, and team members have access to the critical information they need.
Making the transition from single purchases (retail) to an organizational subscription can be daunting without a clear plan. However, there are numerous benefits to a subscription, including:
- Team-wide access to important standards
- Access to historical versions of the standards
- Access to comparison tools (highlighting changes between versions)
- Automatic updates and new versions of standards
- Access to standards across all devices (Web, Tablet, Desktop)
This quick guide highlights how to effectively implement a subscription. To explore this topic in greater detail, see our in-depth Industry Standards Buyers guide.
Assessing Your Needs
The first step is to identify the standards that your team members are using. This can be done by polling them and discussing their needs. However, it is important to focus on the team’s actual needs in this process, since broad wishlists can easily exceed budgets and your team’s current requirements. When starting on a standards subscription, it is typically best to start small and grow over time.
Next, you will need to reduce any duplicate information and identify the most critical standards and standards bodies. We recommend reviewing regulatory requirements, customer expectations, and any contractual obligations linked with industry standards. Contracts often require certain products or processes to meet, or be certified to, essential standards — these should be at the top of your list.
Pricing for standard subscriptions typically scales with the number of locations that need access, as well as the number of users who need to view standards from the same publisher at the same time. (Ex: User A views IEEE 1010, while user B views IEEE 1048.) These are two most essential factors when establishing a subscription, and must be quantified for each standards body. Contact our demo team for a helpful template to assess these two numbers.
You may also need to build a business case to obtain a centralized budget for purchasing standards, since leadership may initially view subscriptions as an additional cost. However, once presented with the current annual cost for all of the one-time standards purchases that occur — compared to the cost and additional value of a subscription — it can be much easier to get approval.
Selecting a Provider
When it comes to standards subscriptions, each provider (e.g. Nimonik, Intertek Inform, Accuris…) offers a very different set of advantages. While first-time subscribers may only look at providers that carry all of their necessary documents, a great standards subscription is about more than just the coverage. The majority of users also want the subscription platform to include:
- Access to historical documents
- Powerful comparison tools
- Usage reports
- Great user experience and search functions
However, each provider is so different that many companies opt for a “split solution”. Instead of choosing between Provider A (optimal platform, carries most documents) and Provider B (frustrating platform, but carries all documents), they get as many documents as possible from Provider A and complete their library with small additions from Provider B.
A big reason for this is cost control, or budget optimization. Provider B may have all of the necessary publishers, but charge more than Provider A and provide less services. Establishing a subscription with Provider A for 85% of your standards, and one with Provider B for the remaining 15%, can result in substantial savings. Cost is just one of many reasons though.
Considerations when selecting subscription provider:
- Accessibility
- How easy is it to search, locate, and access the standards?
- Are they available on mobile devices and/or offline?
- Can users easily find and access their standards?
- Updates
- How frequently does the provider update the standards?
- Support:
- What kind of support does the provider offer?
- Does their customer success team understand standards and engineering needs?
- Do they respond promptly and offer training?
- IT Security
- Does the provider offer Single Sign On?
- Are they ISO 27001 certified?
- Cost
- Is the pricing structure suitable for your budget? Evaluate platform and software costs in addition to the cost of the standards.
- Do you require all the functionality proposed by the publisher or is another publisher better suited to your needs?
Setting Up Access
Once you launch a subscription, you’ll need to plan and structure the platform access for your company. (Note: Planning this before you purchase a subscription allows you to ask better questions of potential providers.)
Key action items:
- Create accounts for relevant employees, ideally using Single Sign-On
- Provide training on how to use the subscription platform. (Choosing a provider that offers a dedicated account manager can greatly simplify training.)
- Establish guidelines for accessing and using the standards. An internal document can be created by leveraging the provider’s documentation and adding in your company specific information. (Providers with strong customer support teams will have better documentation.)
- Ensure that access is controlled and monitored, ensuring that only the correct people have access to the sites and standards.
- Ensure your company has a designated manager to work with your standard provider(s) for one-off purchases, additional standards, user management and other issues that may arise.
Integrating Standards into Workflows
Maximize the benefits of your subscription by integrating standards into your workflows. For example, Nimonik’s platform allows you to manage responsibilities for reviews of standards and requirements, add meta-data, and generally improve the use of standards throughout your organization.
Quick tips:
- Incorporate standards into product design and development processes.
- Use standards in quality control procedures and link back to them on your standards subscription platform.
- Refer to standards during training sessions.
- Conduct regular reviews of standards to ensure compliance.
Maintaining and Reviewing Your Subscription
Now that your standards subscription program is set up, we recommend regularly taking time to maintain and review your subscription. Subscriptions are typically annual, so you will want to plan a strategic review of your account a few months before each renewal to optimize costs and ensure your team has the right standards at their fingertips.
Quick tips:
- Extract your subscription usage report to see which standards are being viewed, printed, downloaded, and used.
- Assess the value of the subscription periodically by discussing ongoing needs with your colleagues.
- Evaluate your organization’s usage of the software package that your provider offers.
You can — and should — adjust the subscription as your organization’s needs change. For example, standards that saw no activity in your usage report could be removed from your plan to reduce costs or make room for other standards.
Certain providers are less transparent than others in this area and may not want to share usage reports with you. (After all, adjusting your subscription can translate to less revenue for providers.) However, we believe that customer transparency nurtures long-term partnerships. Your Nimonik account representative will be happy to work with you on all of the points listed above, and more!
Takeaway
Shifting from fragmented purchases to an organized subscription is a process. It requires planning, budgeting, researching providers, and finding the right solution for your organization. However, it quickly delivers substantial long-term benefits.
- Broad access and ease-of-use
- Centralized company library
- Multi-device access (Web, Tablet, Desktop)
- Unlimited users
- Increased value
- Automatic updates to standards
- Historical records
- Comparison tools
- Strong cost control
- No more duplicate purchases
- Visibility of company-wide standards usage
- Bulk savings
Learn more about our standards subscription package, or request a demo with our team to start setting up yours today.
