Standardisation in risk management
Résumé
Standardization is the most adequate solution to quickly capitalize and disseminate knowledge and have it implemented in the industry to guarantee sustainable competitiveness and operation according to the state of the art and to reference documents. Not everything can be standardized, the priorities need to be defined. In particular, it seems to be important to develop standardization aspects related to health, safety and environment issues in relation with new industrial technologies. The standardization context is evolving very quickly under the impulsion of the DG Enterprise and Industry, and with the support of CEN-CENELEC. To ease access to standardization is one of the implementation priorities of the EU 2020 Strategy. Standardization and related certification is becoming more flexible. The Express report as well as the STAIR approach clearly demonstrate this evolution. The Express report introduced the possibility to give access to consortia to standardization to develop pre-normative documents at EU-Level that can easily be transformed in CEN standards or ISO standards. CEN has launched the STAIR initiative (An Integrated Approach for Standardization, Innovation and Research) that is encouraged to be applied to research projects dealing with emerging technologies. According to the STAIR approach, standardization does not come as an afterthought but is built into a project proposal right at the start. This introduces , significant benefit potential for the project itself and for any actions after the project's life-time. With this flexibility pre-standard documents can be prepared quicker and therefore better answer the needs that are either to disseminate good practices or to build trust between the producers/industry and the client/ consumer when it concerns new industrial technologies. This appears to be a great opportunity for EU-VRi and for the projects where EU-VRi is playing a leading role such as iNTeg-Risk.