It may be useful at this stage to take account of the practical use of standardization for fasteners. Who wants the standards and who uses them ? Part of the answer can be found by looking into the working groups, which develop the standards.

In the first place, the manufacturers of fasteners carry out the standardization work in ISO/TC 2. Only a few experts from the user or stockholder side (dealer/distributor in supplies for manufacturers) participate in the work. Within the wide range of users, it is the automotive industry, which plays the leading role in defining the requirements, and the manufacturers are well aware of what the automotive industry (but also other industries) expects from standardization.

This is the reason why the standardization of fasteners works satisfactorily, although the users are mostly under-represented.

Under these circumstances, it is not astonishing that most proposals for new ISO standards or for revisions of existing standards are pushed by the automotive industry or are made at least in consideration of the requirements of this industry. For the rest one could say: "What is good for the automotive industry is good for other branches as well." The automotive companies are global players and show, therefore, a particular interest in ISO standards. If we look at countries in which national standards have been replaced by ISO standards, we find that the conversion to products according to ISO standards takes place in a most consequent way in the automotive industry. This is, unfortunately, not always the case for other branches of industry, for three main reasons:

1.  The conversion from existing national standards to ISO standards forces the user to incur enormous organizational and logistical expense, since fasteners are used in thousands of places and may require constructional changes.

2.  The products according to the ISO standards are not always available, at least not at a reasonable price, and the individual users do not have sufficient economic "weight" to influence the market.

3.  Many users of fasteners are not aware of the existence of the new standards. They still ask for the products manufactured according to former standards (in general national standards), since they are not informed of the fact that ISO standards have replaced the national standards.

The experience gained during the last few years shows that the process of conversion to products according to ISO standards will take a long time. Nevertheless, the results of systematic reviews of ISO standards prove that we are on the right path. The overwhelming majority of member countries approve the ISO standards, which we have developed, and only in very few cases has the withdrawal of ISO standards due to insufficient relevance for the market been required.