Mr. Alton Sanders (Boeing): The User Perspective on Safety, Standards, and Digital Transformation in Aerospace”

What does it take to make standards truly work in high-stakes industries like aerospace?

In this episode, we speak with Alton Sanders (Boeing), a leading expert in standards management with over 40 years of experience.

From aircraft safety to digital transformation, Alton shares how standards shape every aspect of aerospace engineering—often in ways that are invisible but mission-critical. He explains why even the smallest components can have major consequences, and how better-designed standards directly improve quality, safety, and efficiency.

The conversation also explores a key shift facing industries worldwide: the move from traditional document-based standards to structured, digital data. As engineering systems become more advanced, standards must evolve to remain usable, reliable, and relevant.

 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why standards are fundamental to safety in aerospace
• How user experience can make or break a standard
• The real challenges of applying standards in practice
• Why digital standards are the future—and what’s at stake

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hello and welcome to the Voice of Standard Users, a podcast brought to you by iFac. I'm Time Warren, your host, and in each episode, I speak with leaders towards shaping industries around the globe to the use of standards in practice. I'm happy to introduce our today's guest, Mr. Alton Standards from Boeing. Mr. Standards is an associate technical fellow and a designated expert for standards management at the Boeing Company. The focus of his 40-year career has been on improving the quality and value of standards and transition standards from documents to digital data. Alton's accomplishments at Boeing have been recognized with industry awards such as a Computer World Honors Program Lureate and a Progressive Manufacturers High Achiever for Innovation Mastery. Mr. Sanders is the founder and the chair of the Digital Standards Alliance Consortium. He is a seven-year member of the American National Standards Institute Executive Standards Council, and he's also a member of IFEN. Welcome to our podcast, Alton.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Sure. So I would like to start our conversation by asking you how did your professional journey lead you to Boeing? And when did you first feel the real responsibility that comes with your aerospace work?

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Oh, that's a great question. Well, I really started out at uh McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company in St. Louis, Missouri, right out of college. And um it was at a time, well, let me say that McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis was a military aircraft fighter jet manufacturer.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

And I grew up in the St. Louis area. Um they were very busy with several programs at the time, and so they were doing a lot of hiring. And so I just got out of college, luckily at the right time, to go work for a company. Um, but I hadn't really had ambitions about being in aerospace. I didn't even really know very much about McDonnell Douglas. Um, in fact, I saw my interview results sheet uh about a year after the interview was over, and I said, this person is a great student, but they know nothing about our company, uh, but they hired me anyway. Uh so I was glad to just have the job. I didn't intentionally move in that way. Uh later on, uh in the late 1990s, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merged into one company. So I've been with you know the same operation the whole time. And I was hired into what McDonnell Douglas called the standards department. So um my career has had this standards focus uh my entire um time here. Uh now you ask when did it really seem to have some sort of um you know real meaning for me?

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

And um I would say that when well, there were a couple of things. Early in my career, we were developing an aircraft, um, and I was asked to work on some of the lighting panels that went into the what we call the cruise station, some people call it the cockpit. And you know, I it was a big um source of pride for me that these buttons and knobs and light bulbs that I was putting in the uh design, you know, were the things that every pilot needed to interact with every single time. You know, and for a fresh out of college person, this was very satisfying. It was very I felt very proud of that. Uh so that in and of itself, I got started out in a way that I really felt like I was doing something that made a difference, and uh I had a source of pride in my work. Um, the other thing is that shortly after I got hired, um we had the first uh space shuttle disaster, and uh the um, I think it was Columbia, um exploded on takeoff and all these lives were lost. It was a you know terrible tragedy. But um, you know, a lot of the research into why that happened um boiled down to the failure of an O-ring. And in my um, and I mean if you really study the whole thing, it's not really the O-ring's fault. It was asked to do something it wasn't supposed to do. But um that was the kind of things that I was doing at the company. I was working on small parts like light bulbs and connectors and o-rings and washers and nuts and fasteners. And so it really became very um meaningful to me that all these little things that I work with, while they might seem like small pieces of something far grander, it only takes one of these small pieces to not be well designed or well-engineered or have good sources. And so everything I put into these standards had to be really, really, you know, perfect. And so it drove home a real sense uh to me that this was a life and death decision, and I should not be careless uh uh about anything that I did in my work and standards. Uh so that is really where it hit me, and that's how I got to really uh get started in that part of the space.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Great story. So, can you recall a moment in your career when safety was not theoretical but deeply personal? What role did standards play in this moment?

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Well, um yeah, the shuttle thing, well, although that wasn't a uh McDonald's product uh at the time, but um you know sadly, tragically, you know, there are uh you know accidents and uh problems that have happened in aerospace, not just Boeing aircraft, but but in many others. And uh sometimes when they go back and do the research and really try to understand what happened, you know, it was something wasn't done exactly per the specification and the standard that said how it had to be installed or tested or verified that something happened. And you think in normal everyday business, you know, everybody does the job, they do the job the same way things are supposed to, you know, and they're performing well in the field, you know, but um the instructions that we write down as standards on how to manufacture something, whether that's how to assemble something or how to create a part by machining it or forging it or something like that, all the specifications we write for that, um, you know, they're very, you know, everything is critical. There's nothing that's not, you know, critical, you know, in safety. I mean, you might even you might say that uh in a cabin of an airplane, maybe my little screen that lets me play a video game isn't so critical, but uh there are everything else about what holds the plane together and makes it uh propel. You know, all these decisions are critical. So the parts, the way that they're held together, the way that parts are manufactured and formed, the quality that inspections that go into the materials themselves that uh get used, you know, in the product, it's it's just pervasive. Um, at my company, we estimate that 40% of the definition of an airplane comes from standards. 40% of the product definition. Yeah. Um very significant. What designers are doing is just let's take this metal, which has been defined by a standard, and you know, machine it per some standard manufacturing process, and then let's install a fastener per fastener installation process. And those fasteners themselves are written to standards, and you're using standard tooling to get the job done. And um, a lot of what you know what makes one plane different from the other is the other 60% of the design, but the building blocks for all airplanes, right? Is a pretty solid core of materials, of parts, and and manufacturing processes. Now, sometimes you get new processes that weren't used in the past. 3D printing is an example of something that's come along recently that we didn't have in the 60s, 70s, 80s. Um, but you know, and and there's always other technologies that are being explored and and applied in different ways. Even composite um materials that are used in most aerospace now weren't the technologies we used in the 60s and 70s and early 80s. Uh so I think that's uh that that's how I feel about it. It's just so pervasive in everything we do in my business that uh being in the standards work, you can really feel how much you get to touch every single thing we built. And of course, safety is, I mean, everything we do is safety. Um, you know, especially, well, anything that carries human beings, but even and not only that, but uh how safety reveals itself in our manufacturing operations.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

That's another big part of it. I mean, I we talk about the safety of the vehicle and the people who ride the vehicles, but um people who have to make and assemble the vehicle, you know, they've got to be kept 100% safe too. We can't design a manufacturing standard that is in any way provides risk.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

Right. Wow, 40% is a significant number. So what does using standards actually look like in a daily aerospace work beyond documents and compliance?

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Okay, let's see. So you know, we have uh let's say libraries uh that we maintain of standards because we use a lot of standards that are created by industry associations, such as and the United States military has you know a big resource of military specs and standards that go into our products, and they go into commercial products as well as military products. Um, there's uh Aerospace Industries Association in the U.S. uh publishes a lot of standards that are um very highly used in our company, Society of Automotive Engineers, as well. And I could go on ASTM, ASME, I could list a bunch of companies, but yeah, I would say there's five or six companies that do the bulk, but if I add it all up, you know, we have maybe 200 standards um providers that we um use their standards in our products and you know in the in how we conduct our business. Um in addition to that, Boeing creates its own internal company standards when there isn't an industry standard that really does the job that we really need done. I need something just like this industry standard, but I need it with purple stripes instead of pink stripes, and so I'll have to write a Boeing standard to define that thing. And in our company, we have 200,000 of those documents, which seems like a crazy number. It's bigger than most standards libraries, right? But the reason that number is so big is that Boeing has grown through merger and acquisition. So some of those were McDonald's standards, and some of those were Douglas Aircraft standards, and some of those were Rockwell standards and Hughes Company standards. And so what used to be seven or eight different companies are all now Boeing. And those old products from before they were merged are still out there flying and they need to be supported. So we've got um we've got this library, we have to maintain it. It's a hell of a library, yes. It's a big task. Um, one thing my company has done uh differently than um some of our competitors is that um we've centralized our standards operations across the whole corporation. And so we don't have different cities have different systems for how you manage that. We have stabilized that process and we can reach into each other's standards. And if someone working on an old McDonnell aircraft jet, let's say, um, can use a standard that is also being used on a 737 commercial airplane, you know, at a different time, though that library is shared, and you know, the information is shared across um the company on that. Um and as users, they get to speak out and um say vote on changes to the standard and be part of the community that um you know gets to interact with the people who we call them custodians, the groups that run those uh the changes to the standard. So we've got a nice smooth system. It cuts down on proliferation and growth of standards because one already exists somewhere else in the company, and we get to share that a lot more. So yeah, so that's that that is something I I think really works well for us. And uh, but so in so doing, getting back to your original question, so we've got to have these catalogs, and we've got to make these catalogs available to you know, designers, to quality, to manufacturing engineering, to people who are on the shop floor. So people ought to be able to take a standard and go to a computer and type in a number and and have that uh document uh available to them. Um in addition to that, because we have standards from so many different organizations, um you have this problem where people say, Oh, I've got a part number on my design, and I need to know you know what is the diameter of this part, or what is you know, the material or the finish or something on that. Now, that won't be just the standard number, that will maybe be a complete long part number. And people who work in procurement or work in manufacturing, they don't know is this an aerospace industry standard, or is this a Boeing standard, or is this a Lockheed standard? Right. They don't know. They just know they have a part number. And so this is uh where I put a lot of uh my own effort in my career has been breaking down the content of those standards and putting them into different databases so that someone can say, here's a part number, and now give me the dimensions, give me the uh materials, and give me what quality instructions are uh are appropriate for that. Uh so a lot of um you know what we try to do to you know make this available is we make catalogs available of the standards themselves, uh specialized catalogs for the to get into the granular levels of detail inside the standard without having to reinterpret it as a human every single time uh the question comes up. Um, someone can walk up to one of our systems and say, I need a fastener, and it has to be three inches long, and it has to be made of corrosion-resistant steel, and it needs to have a hex head, and you know, some pitch of the thread might be important. And they'll put these features into the system, and then our systems can say, Oh, well, I've got some standards from this group and some standards from that group, and I've got some old standards from Hughes Helicopter Company, and I've got this or that, and then we can find those things across the company. They don't know what standard they're looking for, they just can describe what they are trying to see to do, and then our systems will tell them, oh, well, something like that is on this standard or that standard, or here's three standards that might solve your problem. And people who um who are not me don't need to know all the standards in the world. They're just using something. It's kind of like shopping on um a website, like you know, here Amazon is a popular website. You type in what you want, they'll tell you who's selling it. And that's kind of how our system will tell you what standard that's on if you tell me what you're looking for. So that's another way that people interact with our systems to get to standards without knowing the standard that they're trying to get to in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

Right. Pretty sophisticated system. So can you share an example of what?

SPEAKER_00 19:07

It's taken a long time to build those.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Pretty impressive. So can you share an example where a standard clearly improves safety or quality, and perhaps where it didn't fully match operational reality?

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Uh yeah, we've got a um I've got a story. Um you install a fastener, and let's say that all our airplanes are held together with millions of fasteners, right? And so installing these fasteners is one of the basic things we do uh at our company. And um there's a measure of how much you tighten down the fastener called the torque. And so, and there are these tools called torque wrenches that you can apply to where the fastener was, and you can see how it gives you a number that tells you how tight that fastener is. And if you know, in most cases you don't want to make it too tight, but you can't leave it loose, and we can't have fasteners working themselves loose once they've been applied to uh an aircraft. So um the instructions for installing the fastener and torquing it to a certain value is um involves a lot of steps and a lot of formulas to calculate it correctly. And so once upon a time in our company, we would just give this explanation to manufacturing to say how to calculate what the torque should be, and then the operator who's doing it would have to figure out what the number should be, and they'd apply it, and then the exposure would come along and they would calculate it, and they would come up with a different number. It's like, oh, because the formula is complicated, and you had to look in three different standards, maybe to find out all the values that had to come together to give you this torque value. And at that point, the you know, when you manufacture something in production like we do, you try to pay attention to where your worst problems are. And the number one problem we had was getting people to agree on torque. And now we had this torque spec that was written in the 1940s.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Um you know, and a lot of Boeing, just to be honest, a lot of Boeing specs that we use today started out in the 40s when we were building aircraft to support World War II. And um, and that was really the big jets when they started to really be manufactured. Um Anyway, it was the number one problem getting the torque right. So we tried to figure out how to resolve that problem and improve the torque spec. We had different inspectors and different operators and the engineers who wrote the torque spec all together and try to work this thing out. We had five experts get together and figure out what is the torque in this case or this case or this case. And they never agreed. No two people agreed on what the torque was, and they all had some reason why the spec wasn't great. So we developed a system where we calculated the formulas and we didn't leave it up to individuals to go look up different pieces at different places. We figured it out for them. So now you can again walk up to a computer terminal and it will tell you how many inch pounds of torque you know this installation should be or that one. And now the people who give the instructions to the operators on our shop floor, they just tell them the number. They don't tell them how to figure out a number, they give you the number. And so that went from the number one problem we had to the number 300 problem we had.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

So that was a big deal just in terms of making a quality product that was safe to fly, you know, out the door. And there wouldn't be any debate over whether or not, you know, we had done it correctly. Uh and it was a major way to rethink of how the standard was written with the user in mind. And so again, it goes back to the mission of IFAN. I'm a user of a standard, and the standard is poor in terms of how I have to understand what my job is. And so uh this is one of the things that's attracted me to IFAN is you know, it's the voice of the user, the voice of the customer of the standard, saying, we can do a better job with standards, um, but we have to listen to the user and not to the scientist who wrote the standards.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Yeah. So that's that's my best story on bad standards, good standard.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

So my next question is when user needs are not expressed in standards development process, what are the real consequences?

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Well, um, I'll give you another example. So now uh you mentioned that I'm uh chairman of the Digital Standards Alliance, and a lot of my career has been on trying to turn these documents into interactive digital data.

SPEAKER_01 24:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

And I've given some examples of that. Um when um so now, let's just say in today's world, and not the in the history of the time I've worked at the company, but in today's world, everything is going into a computer system. And uh, you know, all aerospace companies are designing their aircraft in 3D models, and we want to be able to take sections of the aircraft and run them through computer simulations, or maybe the whole aircraft is going through a computer simulation. And we're gonna try different, you know, wind shears and different, you know, rain conditions and vibration and heat and all the things that challenge, you know, the um uh the safety of flight of an aircraft, or individual parts, and really bend them and test them and find out what their limits are in the computer system before we go out and try to actually build the thing. And then, of course, we'll still test the real thing, but um, you want to know as much as you can before you start cutting metal and making parts. So um by having this sort of a is a sort of a new demand that our comp our standards have to be consumed by the computer system to be able to run those simulations. To fasten a wing to an aircraft, I've got to have the bolts and the screws that we have standards for have to be digitally modeled in three dimensions, and they and the washer and the nut have to fit onto the shaft of the screw, and we have to be able to say, I know how tight that's going to hold, and I should know by computer simulation where it would break under which extreme circumstances. Um, but those standards weren't written for this time in the world, those standards were written in the 40s and 50s and 60s, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:57

A different era. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:58

A different era. And so they were made by a for a person who says, okay, I'm going to look up a number on page three and I'm going to carry that number back to page two and look up another table. And, you know, it's a it's a puzzle to figure out what is the exact call out I need to know to get the standard part I want, or what is the right um uh, you know, if I if I know a part number, how do I dissect it and figure out what is this made of? What is the finish on the material, what is the strength of this um device. Uh those things, you know, they take kind of an expert in standards to read the standard, and and you know, now we don't have those experts. Now the expert is going to be in the computer system. Yeah. And so our standards are not written for the computer. And and a lot of what I do now is to say, let's rewrite these as digitally sensible that the computer can look at this and understand it. And it's a lot more work than just slipping a piece of paper into an AI reader. You know, there even AI finds this stuff very hard. And in our business, because safety is the number one thing, we don't trust AI to make those decisions. There's no way. It cannot get it wrong. You know, there being wrong is not in any way imaginably acceptable under any circumstance. So, you know, we're we're trying to build these things very so well structured that no misinterpretation, you know, can be made. And then from that, you know, figure out those accuracies. Another thing I'll I'll say is that let's just make it simpler. Um, when you go shopping online and you buy something, and usually the website will say, Oh, people who bought this product bought some other product. And so you can do that with these things. Let's say I have a bolt and I need a washer and a nut to put on that bolt. Well, those are three different standards. And so if I'm shopping, if I decide on the bolt I'm going to use and I know other features of the joint that I'm trying to create, then the computer could say, oh, well, if you're using that bolt, then this washer would fit, and that nut would fit, and they've got compatible materials and they've got the strength properties, you know, that are uh normally used with this bolt, you know, and um it doesn't choose for you, but it recommends uh here's, you know, see if this is good for you. And this saves people a lot of time and it promotes the use of existing standards before people start looking around and shopping for other things uh to um to introduce to our production that you know that would be new to us and that haven't been tested yet. So we're trying to steer people as much as possible to proven tested technology.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

Right, right. So building on your response here to this question, have you seen a situation where user input changed as standard and made it made it much better?

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Well, I I do think that the story I told you about the torque was is was one example of that, where the users just said this spec doesn't work and we've got to start over again. And so that that is probably you know one example uh you can think about. Um I think where we see that generally the most is in standards for manufacturing processes, not so much um buying a material or buying a fastener or buying a light bulb, but um how to heat treat some material or how to install a fastener. And so when you're giving detailed instructions to people uh step by step that they're going to follow in the manufacturing floor, um I think that's where we get the best feedback from people after they're they're trying this out and they're working on it. And we test this stuff out, we just don't write standards and throw them on the shop floor. I mean, they're we we tested these things in labs and stuff before we actually put it into production. But just because it worked in the lab doesn't mean that it's convenient or simple for everybody who comes along the shop floor. Um, one challenge I'll say is that our specs have been written, and this is historically, so I'll just say, you know, we're an old company, and everything we do today is a lot better than what we did, you know, 80 years ago or 40 years ago. Um, but we still have some of those old standards um out there. Um, so some of these specs can be really complex, and it's like what I would call a choose your own adventure. You know, it says apply this sealant, you know, to this uh level of um a certain pressure capability. Right. And there might be 30 different ways to apply sealant on the sealing spec. And you have to go through this thing and figure out oh, I've got, you know, this is true and that is true, so then I'm gonna go to page eight, and now you go to page eight and you look up a table, and in that table it takes you, says, Oh, okay, well, under these materials are the certain materials, and the sealant has to be frozen before you apply it, and then you go to some other page to go figure it out. And so, I mean, we don't ask the person on the shop floor to figure that out. We have in my company a discipline called manufacturing engineering. They take the engineering document and turn it into some smaller level detailed work instruction. But every time they do, it's a whole new mystery to figure out how do I get to the very specific thing that the person has to do from this long complicated uh spec.

SPEAKER_01 33:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

And so my company is investing a lot right now in how to break those apart. You know, that was probably a good method when we only had paper, and you didn't want to have 50 different specs on how to seal something. But now, again, because computer systems and we don't need to have stacks of paper everywhere. Um, you know, now I can make these things more intelligent, more refined. I don't need 90 different kinds of sealing in one document. I could have 90 documents, and who cares uh now, you know. So we're doing a lot to uh to simplify the process, right? Simplify the process. And and a lot of that comes from the user saying, I just it's taken me all day to read your spec. And then if that person doesn't do it and they just pass it down the line, then the next person, now I've got five people that need to read the spec publicly or 50 people, and so you know, move that complexity up to the as high up the line as you can so you don't have lots and lots of people around the world trying to solve this mystery of what the spec is telling me to do. Right. Yeah. Now I know I just want to blurt out something. You know, people all around the world depend on Boeing aircraft for the lives of themselves and their families. And so I'm telling you stories that make you, I don't want people to think, oh, I'm not gonna fly in a Boeing airplane because they're too complicated. That is, I'm just talking about how we improve business. You know, these aircraft are safe, these aircraft you know are carefully tightly regulated. Everything we do has a strong safety focus to it. So I'm just telling you, in the course of my 40-year career, you know, there have been um stories where I really felt like we've made a big difference in improving something. Right. Um but uh please don't think I fully understand these stories about uh that I fly a Boeing airplane and I put my children and grandchildren on it.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

I fully understand that. So, Alton, what distinguishes meaningful user participation for a mere symbolic or superficial involvement?

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Well, let's see, that's really great comment. You know, I think you see that um more when you work with industry committees and they have a balance of um stakeholders represented at those committees that write these specs and standards. So you do have more people who are just the users. If it is a product that you're talking about, you'll have manufacturers uh at the table. You probably have regulators, uh, government regulators or military customers, uh, you know, involved in some of these committees. And so, and and this is one of the things, you know, I'm you mentioned I'm on the American National Standards Institute Executive Standards Council. And this is one thing that we really look at when we accredit someone as an American National Standard um publisher is to make sure that they have this um strong commitment to representation of users and uh the breadth of stakeholders that are there. And if any of those organizations fall down in that area, you know, we'll take away their accreditation until they straighten that. Wow. Um and I've in the seven years I've been doing this, um we pulled a lot of accreditations, you know, but they get the message uh quickly and uh straighten that out. Uh, you know, no one's really left in trouble for a long time because it's not a hard problem to solve. You find out who your stakeholders are and you make sure you really extend yourself to them and that you invite them to participate. But we can't have the manufacturers running the committees. Um, you know, we need those users and those things uh just as much. Um and you know, I would say in Boeing, you know, we support over 500 industry committees where we're sending engineers or other, depending on the kind of standard it is, uh, to different aerospace committees, sometimes more than one person to the same committee, um, because we might have issues where a helicopter and a satellite have different needs, and so one person may not have all the experience that's needed to represent the breadth of a product. So, you know, it could be multiple people, but they're you know, it's again a super important thing. These standards are part of our aircraft design, they're the definition of our product, and they have to be just as good as anything we design ourselves, and we have to assure that. So making sure that we're represented in those committees is is a big, big deal. And and we know from going to those committees, Airbus is in those meetings and Lockheed is in those meetings, and all the companies we compete with, it's the same thing for them too. It's you know, it's just how our industry, you know, really operates. Um, internally to Boeing, um, we don't really work by committee. Um, you know, we have experts in different technologies who who will write a standard, but then it goes out for a very broad review and feedback. And um so it's more asynchronous. You don't have a bunch of people gathered around a table because, again, in our place, these people are all over the world anyway. We're not all working in a building where we can just close the door.

SPEAKER_01 39:44

Synchronize place, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

Yeah. Um, but uh, you know, we have a processes for uh marking up the standard, for asking questions, for slowing it down, for saying this isn't ready, and send it back for more work, you know. Um, you know, so it's it's a we still get procurement and quality and manufacturing planning, you know, all those just safety uh ergonomics people, everybody of all these disciplines, you know, gets a shot at looking at the standard, looking at what did you change from the last time, and um, you know, how does that affect us? So, you know, we have a you know, really it's a mandatory process. These people have to respond. We don't put up if quality doesn't answer our question for can we make this change, the change doesn't go out till they say yes.

SPEAKER_01 40:38

Right.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

Yeah, so it's a very strict thing, we don't skip people, it's it's built into the process.

SPEAKER_01 40:45

Great. So we are nearing the end of our podcast. Alton, if you could tell standards developers one message about listening to users, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 41:01

One message. Yeah, so uh I would say, you know, again, uh so much of my personal emphasis is on uh the digital use of standards and how we're gonna feed them into computer systems. And many standards publishers, they're just paper publishers, they don't really often understand what they don't know what kind of system I'm putting their tools in. They don't know how much money I spend taking their standard and breaking it down into digital components so that I can load it into a computer screen that will let me do searches and and that sort of thing. And so um, and they don't know you know the databases and things I'm going to feed with that data. So I would say that um it's really important for them to know what happens to the standard after I receive it. How much money do I spend just using their standard, and how much extra time and trouble that sort of thing is. Um at some point, and uh you know, we're going to either have to say as a company, we can't use industry standards anymore because they don't speak to our use case. Our use case is that everything's going into these computer systems, right? And your PDFs do not get me there. And if I've got to spend time and money to break your standard apart, to put it into a computer format that I can put into my own system, then you know at some point it becomes more trouble to use your standard than to say, I'm just going to write a Boeing spec that by definition is started out as a digital thing.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

Right.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

And then I'm just going to work in an all-digital environment. And then those standards publishers on the outside will either fall away or they will have to run hard to catch up. Now, I know they're not big companies, I know they don't have a lot of money, I know they don't have uh the kind of technology savvy that a Lockheed or an Airbus or a Boeing would have, but that is the future, at least in my industry, of what's happening with these standards. And so standards publishers really need to understand our use case and the use case across our entire supply chain across the whole globe, uh, on you know where this is going. And they've only got a few more years, really, I think, to catch up. I'd be shocked 10 or 15 years from now, we're still doing it like we're doing it today. I think things are going to speed up and commitments will be made. My my other guess is that it's not just a Aerospace. I think medical device manufacturers, I think automotive companies, I think oil and gas industry, they're all investing heavily in these, you know, smart technology infrastructures to consume that will consume these standards, and these PDFs are not going to make it in the future. They've got to understand the content. They've got to structure the content to be computer sensible. And so that's where I think they've got to listen to the users. Now the the users have a responsibility to speak up. They can't just say, oh, well, I just hate this and complain about it. They've got to go talk to their standards publishers that they rely on. So it's a partnership, I believe, but the standards developers can't say, well, we can't afford to do that. If you can't afford to do that, you know, you're going to become irrelevant, I think, at some point.

SPEAKER_01 45:02

So the big message that you are just described is that the ability to digitize standards is a mission critical for startup writing, right?

SPEAKER_00 45:12

If I can summarize critical for us as users, and it's mission critical for standards publishers as well.

SPEAKER_01 45:21

Right. Very good. So this is a point in time where I I thank you, Alton, for your insights, your expertise, and deep knowledge that you shared with us today. Very valuable. And I would like to wish you much success in achieving your objectives and point. Thank you, listeners, for tuning in to the voice of standards users. I hope this podcast has benefited you because standards make the world go round. Thank you Welter.