When is a subscription better than a single document?
Traditionally, engineering firms have maintained their own libraries of specifications, compliance standards, and industry guidelines in-house. Today, thousands of firms have discovered the unique benefits of subscribing to a fully-searchable, online service which conveys volumes of these materials in an easily accessed, convenient electronic format. They have chosen to avoid the effort and cost of maintaining an up-to-date standards library in favor of the simpler subscription approach, which delivers the most recent reference information to every desktop in their organization. When should engineering firms consider switching to online reference?
When your company purchases more than $3000 in standards per year:
Subscriptions not only prove more convenient than an in-house library, in many cases they also prove more cost-effective then deliveries of hard copy or CD-ROM documents. If your firm relies on more than five different standards publications, then a specification and standard online subscription makes good economic sense. With an online subscription service, you only pay for the particular topics you use regularly, rather than investing in a set of volumes filled mostly with specifications irrelevant to your discipline.
When your standards library needs updating:
Especially when you use documents from several different industrial societies and standard organizations, library content can easily slip out of currency without careful attention. Not having the proper references available may delay the start of a project. By leaving the tasks of monitoring the expiration of guidelines up to the online service, your company is assured that engineers are always using the most current industry data. Moreover, the subscription method eliminates the potential mistakes of producing design work based an outmoded specification.
When reference work delays engineering work:
Researching specifications is a time-consuming task that detracts from an engineers’ valuable time. Paging through several documents, trying to interpret the logic of confusing categories and file structures, and repeating the process for quality checks distracts from more important work. Subscriptions services offer powerful search tools through entire volumes, whose standards entries can be located instantly through document number, topic, keyword, or other criteria, right from an engineer’s keyboard.
When you have multiple users accessing the same standards:
Team members look to reference the same documents on a regular basis. A subscription strategy avoids the conflicts of access, lost or missing library materials, and the costs of ordering multiple copies for distributed office locations. Through a subscription, all personnel can access the same materials simultaneously, whether in the office, at home, or across the continent.
When your products are rapidly diversifying:
If your projects are broadening to include new technologies and areas of expertise, or if your product distribution is expanding to include foreign markets, an online subscription provides a flexible means to quickly gain insight into unfamiliar technical procedures and compliance issues. With a comprehensive online library at your fingertips, even obscure or hard-to-find standards are available for immediate download. A flexible and powerful subscription-based approach is indispensable for companies that are branching out into a rapidly changing global economy.
What’s your situation? Contact IHS to find out how a subscription to IHS Standards Expert Service can work for your company.
The IHS Standards Expert Service provides immediate access to more than a million standards documents from over 370 Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) and industrial societies, covering the full scope of international, national, European, corporate, or historical design guidelines. Additionally, IHS services over 350,000 documents detailing U.S. military and governmental standardization. With full-text search capabilities and easy, controlled access to any web-browser, IHS Standards Expert Service is a comprehensive industrial information resource.
