On the occasion of the World Standards Day, Small Business Standards and SMEunited, the Association of Crafts and SMEs in Europe, would like to reiterate the importance of standards for SMEs and of their participation in the standardisation process.

Regularly, the EU calls on the development of harmonised standards to provide businesses with a presumption of conformity with the essential requirements set out in the EU legislation.  However, international standards increasingly include essential requirements from European legislation allowing their faster adoption by Europe. SBS Director Christel Davidson said: “As a European association representing SMEs in the standardisation process, SBS can only support the development of standards at international level provided the EU principle of inclusiveness, i.e. the representation of underrepresented stakeholders including SMEs, is duly taken up by ISO and IEC in the standards development process.”

SMEs represent 99,8% of the 24 million companies that the European Union counts and hence play an important role in Europe’s economy. The benefits of standards are multifold. They contribute to the interoperability between products and processes while facilitating business interaction, they enable companies to comply with laws and regulations and reduce costs; these are some of the benefits brought by standards.