Case Studies

Companies across the nation rely on standards and conformance to increase efficiency, reduce cost, and boost market access for their products and services. Read two compelling cases below, and then browse the menu to read other examples of how standards and conformance provide concrete solutions to real-world problems.

NAVSTAR GPS (Navigation Satellite Timing and Ranging - Global Positioning System), the largest avionics procurement and installation program in the history of the Department of Defense (DoD), illustrates how strategic standardization can have global impact and revolutionize the way the world functions.

By using a standard radio navigation signal and code provided by the Air Force, the U.S. and its allies realized significant economies of scale through buying, leveraging, and lowering total ownership costs, and reducing acquisition costs while supporting interoperability and logistics readiness. GPS transformed military strategy and logistics, affected many commercial industries, and became the worldwide standard for navigation.

Initiated in 1983 and launched in 1989, GPS cost over $12 billion to develop and deploy. The current annual cost for DoD to operate, sustain, and modernize the GPS is about $500 million. However, the cost of strategic standardization that enabled a single technological solution to a shared problem was infinitesimal compared to the benefit. By making the GPS interface standard available to the entire world, the GPS program produced a global economic impact too large to calculate, and total dollar savings unknowable, but the benefits and potential for GPS is infinite.

Want to learn more? Check out the full-length case study.

– U.S. Department of Defense

Standards allow more organizations to offer sought-after products and services, thereby increasing innovation, competitiveness, and quality while reducing costs and duplicate efforts.

– Wincor Nixdorf Inc. USA

Beyond the bottom line: standards impact quality, lead-time, factory flexibility, and supply chain management.

Standardization and conformity assessment activities lead to lower costs by reducing redundancy, minimizing errors, and reducing time to market.

Demonstrating compliance to standards helps your products, services, and personnel to cross borders. Standards also make cross-border interoperability possible, ensuring that products manufactured in one country can be sold and used in another.

Businesses not only reduce the economic risk of their research and development activities by participating in standardization, they can also lower their overall R&D costs by relying on previously standardized technologies and terminologies.