Events left on their own tend to develop from bad to worse.
Murphy’s Laws
PECULIARITIES OF THE NATIONAL STANDARDIZATION
Events left on their own tend to develop from bad to worse.
Murphy’s Laws
The magic saying ‘competitiveness of domestic products’ has been among the most popular ones in Ukraine’s economics lexicon over the past decade. This combination of words is so modern, sounds so good, has such a wide range of interpretations, and is so vague in terms of its attainment that it can safely be the cornerstone of any economic program. In this case, it is easy to disregard such ‘trifles’ as the present world market with fierce and not always fair competition; antidumping laws; the state of affairs with and development prospects for Ukrainian mineral deposits and crucial imports; deteriorating tangible fixed assets and shortage of finance to fund their repair and reconstruction; high power consumption and scarce national energy resources; cost and quality of commodities produced; lack of a branched network of commercial rep offices and professional advertisement abroad; and many other factors that constitute the backbone of competitiveness in the modern market economy. It was simply neglected that Ukrainian products must be competitive both on foreign and domestic markets to prevent aggressive imports of similar commodities and protect local manufacturers.
However, the industrial standards descended from the Soviet Union had been left the most unnoticed.
By the end of the 1980s when the scientific and technical revolution had been declared, it became clear that the old standardization system, which was tuned to service the planned-distribution Soviet economy and based on the principle that ‘disregard of a standard is prosecuted’, was not as flexible and mobile as it should be in the market economy. Besides, the technical parameters of the old system, to a certain extent, lagged behind international standards.
Apparently, underestimating these factors, Ukraine has failed to timely generate an integral national program of a standardization system taking into consideration all the specific features of the country’s industry, of the transitional period, and of strategic planning outlooks.
The global and, especially, the European experience proves that economic integration and formation of new states and systems, such as the European Economic Community, face an urgent task of legally adapting their by-laws or directly introducing the technical standards adopted in the developed economies that have been chosen as their strategic partners.
When becoming independent, Ukraine had a one-of-a-kind chance to make a correct choice in favor of a worthwhile standardization system. For example, if the country had unambiguously defined integration into the EU as its top priority objective, it would have been natural to officially adopt Europe’s EN standards. Even though it would have been a hard thing to do, Ukraine had industrial, financial, scientific, and technical resources for introduction of the European norms back in the early 1990s. Efforts made to settle this issue would not have affected the scope of the subsequent economic crisis to any significant degree.
On the other hand, the country would have become familiar with the European standards over the following years, would have trained experts, and launched upgrades of the manufacturing facilities in compliance with the Western norms. During this period, products bearing Ukrainian trademarks would have occupied a due place on foreign markets and within the country, which would have led to the economy and the Ukrainian way of life becoming more European-like.
Back in the early 1990s it was obvious that Ukrainian goods would be unable to compete at the world market, whereas the CIS market, first of all, Russia, would account for over a half of the Ukrainian export (only some 8 to 12% of Ukraine’s total production could be consumed domestically). Taking into consideration these factors, it would have been reasonable to retain the Soviet standards and try to accede to the global standardization system jointly with Russia making use of a common accession program.
Unfortunately, the former officials of the State Standard Committee of Ukraine found themselves under pressure of the well-known political forces and chose the third way, which was the most unnatural for the country that declared liberal reforms. It was the creation of a sovereign normative basis, which was in fact nothing but translation of the old Soviet GOST standards (State Technical Standards of the USSR) and the TU (Technical Parameters) into Ukrainian. This, in turn, led to an even greater isolation of the Ukrainian national standards from the commonly adopted international system.
Organizational and legal bases of the Ukrainian standardization system established by the Cabinet’s decrees “On standardization and certification” and “On state control over adherence to standards, norms, and rules, and responsibility for their violation” (all dated 1993) were actually a worsened copy of the Soviet system. Yet, the Ukrainian system gave unnaturally high legislative, executive, controlling, and punitive powers to the State Standard Committee and its regional offices. The following events have illustrated how dangerous this precedent is.
Instead of jointly arranging renewal of normative and metrological basis with the relevant industries, the State Standard Committee launched a ruinous and senseless all-round product certification campaign. This executive body attempted to assure everybody that simple attachment of a plate that reads ‘Certified by UkrSEPRO’ to a product improves the latter’s quality and competitiveness. However, the plate was not that ‘simple’, but rather ‘golden’, because producers had to pay lump amount in national and foreign currencies to the corresponding Ukrainian and foreign authorities for these signs of acknowledgement. The small tricks of this campaign were well understood from the very beginning. In order to acquire a certificate, an enterprise did not have to manufacture supreme quality products in accordance with the world standards. It was quite enough for these products to correspond to the in-house standards effective at this particular enterprise. In this context, the certification campaign did not facilitate promotion of new, up-to-date standards in the industry, but rather pacified the enterprises and discouraged introduction of new standards, improvement of the product mix, enhancement of technology, equipment, testing devices, additional training of the personnel, etc.
Meanwhile, being deprived of financial support and coordination, standardization in the mining and metal industry was heading towards a dead end. The one and the only Central Normalizing and Standardization Research Lab was deemed unnecessary and was closed. The 13 industrial Technical Committees, which were completely left on their own with no financial backup, shrank to 3 to 5 experts, while some of them had an opportunity to employ only one specialist each. A very limited number of skilled standardization experts remained employed in the lead and base scientific research institutes and in standardization departments of specific companies. For comparison, around 1,100 specialists worked in mining and metalmaking standardization departments and organizations back in 1991-92, whereas this number has reduced to less than 250 persons in 2000 (quite a few of the remaining experts have to work part time now). It is quite a task to make up for the standardization lag with these scanty forces. Under the present system of development and coordination, any work team is able to get through only 2 to 3 DSTU (Ukrainian State Technical Standards) or up to 10 TU per year. At the same time, the general scope of this disaster in the mining and metal industry looks as follows.
The industry makes use of more than 13,000 GOST standards relating to main commodities, feedstock, service and auxiliary materials, transportation and power systems, tools, equipment, component parts, measurement and testing devices and methods, labor protection, pollution control, and to all the other regular production factors. Officially, the “Agreement on coordinated policy in the sphere of standardization, metrology, and certification” (signed by top CIS executive officers on March 13, 1992) treats the GOST standards as the international ones, while any limitation of their validity terms was cancelled by the subsequent decision of the International Council on Standardization in CIS Countries (protocol No.7-25 dated April 26, 1995).
However, in fact, Ukraine has begun remaking the GOST standards into the DSTU standards, which are not acknowledged in Russia. In turn, Russia works out its own standards named GOST.R (State Technical Standards of Russia) that are not applicable in Ukraine. The annual Register of Effective Standards marks a significant number of GOST standards with a dot warning that this particular GOST is not used in Russia anymore. However, if Russia does not need the standard, it becomes unclear who is responsible for generation, amendments, and due technical level of this standard. This is a deadlock question, especially, because most GOST standards were worked out in the 1960s-70s and their technical parameters and, particularly, their control and testing methods lag far behind such standards as the EN, America’s ASTM, and others.
How, in what form, under what kind of rules, in what terms, and at whose expense will the tens of thousands of these industrial standards be updated, harmonized, and revised? Who and when will give an answer to this question? Will it be the State Standard Committee? Or, perhaps, the State Committee for Industrial Policy?
The situation with products’ technical parameters (TU), which were approved a long while ago by the Ministry for Ferrous Metallurgy of the USSR and by other Soviet central bodies, is no better. More than 2,000 such documents are now applied in the industry. The majority of these acts is outdated. Developers of these acts work in Russia and many of them have now changed their names, types of ownership, business profiles, or even ceased operation. The Russian State Standard Committee has driven TU parameters out of its jurisdiction. At the same time, the State Standard Committee of Ukraine has imposed stricter rules of registration, introduction of amendments to, and approval of TU parameters. The term of validity of the Soviet TU parameters was limited with January 1995. After this deadline, these acts were to be remade into Ukrainian standards or the State Standard Committee had to prolong their validity every 3 years.
It is obvious that this simple procedure has turned into a well-organized commercial undertaking for regional centers of the State Standard Committee that earn big money on permanent re-registration of the old TU parameters, while institutes, labs, and other structures of the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Ecology, and the State Committee for Labor Protection make good money on the so-called consultations and expert statements. Everybody knows that these expert statements are backed by neither experiments, nor the actual scientific expert work, while hardly any useful amendments are made to the TU parameters. The main objective of this procedure is simply to get the fees for the ‘service’.
Over the past years, Metallurgprom Association has addressed the State Standard Committee, the Ministry for Industrial Policy, and the Cabinet of Ministers a dozen of times with proposals to change the procedure of approval, registration, and application of the former Soviet TU parameters. In particular, Metallurgprom has suggested lifting limitations of validity terms of TU parameters until the old acts are replaced with DSTU standards, TTU parameters, or international standards at the discretion of the industry or individual producers. However, so far there is no force that can put an end to this red tape disorder in Ukraine.
Despite the metal industry’s widespread application of international standards when manufacturing exportable products, this procedure has not been legally defined in the Ukrainian standardization system. Officially, the DSTU 1.3-93 mentions that international standards can be applied as technical parameters “on the basis of international agreements (treaties) or upon permission of authorized regional or national standardization bodies … and on the condition that there are no Ukraine’s state or industrial standards worked out on the basis of these international standards”. It is well known that this provision is actually met neither by the State Standard Committee (except, as regards the GOST standards), nor by the producers.
With a silent connivance of the State Standard Committee, Ukrainian companies apply any foreign standards should the client order so, although not in full. For instance, lacking up-to-date metrological equipment, most Ukrainian companies are unable to adhere to the requirements set by such clauses of foreign standards as Product analysis, Control and testing methods, etc. They simply meet the standard grade composition and assortment. This is why the purchasers have to get into revision tests at their own premises or at the dispatching ports with assistance of such intermediary firms as Australia-based CCI inspection company, France’s Bureau Veritas, Switzerland’s CGS, and so on. It is also a big problem that Ukrainian companies obtain international standards from the third parties, in unauthorized or outdated copies.
Finally, when applying foreign standards in Ukraine, we often forget that EU member-states have the so-called mandatory EU Directives that regulate application of standards in Europe. Infraction to these directives when using EN or national standards of selected European countries can make Ukrainian companies subject to severe financial punitive sanctions, because directives of the Council of European Economic Community “On product safety” (dated April 27, 1989) and “On producer’s responsibility for manufacturing defective goods” (dated July 25, 1989) make producers liable for all claims of the European consumers. There also are a number of conditions and international rules, by virtue of which direct application of foreign standards by Ukrainian enterprises may have the unexpected serious economic consequences for the latter.
This could be the closing paragraph, but the author thought that some readers might ask, “So, what exactly are the peculiarities of the national standardization in Ukraine?” I will try to briefly explain this.
There is hardly a dozen of countries in the world where a State Committee is the national standardization body holding all the rights, powers, and resources to keep the order in the sphere of standardization. Well, Ukraine is one of such countries.
In the other countries, various national standard institutes, standardization associations, engineering and technical societies manage the standards (or rather render the corresponding services). Most notably, these entities do not get financing from the country’s budget.
The difference between Ukraine and the other countries is that the Ukrainian State Standard Committee has failed to do anything during the eight years of its dynamic functioning and none of the normative acts effective today gives clear and rational answers to the pressing problems. The DSTU standards only give clear terms and definitions and that’s all. Drawing this conclusion, the author does not doubt honesty and professional skills of the State Standard Committee’s employees. It is just that these people have been simply put in the unfavorable conditions.
This is why the countries, where skilled standardization specialists who do not have the unlimited rights, but rather assume heavy responsibility, have a clear and legally grounded order that protects the interests of national producers and consumers, i.e. the national interests of the State and its economy.
However, the latest events in Ukraine give ground to hope that the situation with standardization procedures in Ukraine will change for the better. Higher officers of the State Standard Committee have been replaced, new skilled medium-link experts for its central office have been employed, while the number of staff in the regional offices has been reduced multifold. Finally, a specialist with the European ideology and significant experience of working abroad has been elected the chairman of the Committee. A bill “On standardization” has been turned down by the Ukrainian Parliament and is now being revised in compliance with the European models. There is hope that this version of the bill will take into account the metalmakers’ opinion.
The best alternative for Ukraine would be an act similar to Instruction of the Council of EEC “On new approach to technical harmonization and standardization in Western Europe”, which should be notified by the European Union.
And finally, for the first time, the Program of governmental actions contains seven specific provisions on the most important issues of the national standardization system and accreditation on the transition period. If this early stage progresses, all the prerequisites will be in place to create the Ukrainian standardization system capable of securing the industry’s dynamic development and output of high-quality, competitive products.