Standards are increasingly serving as tools and references for product market entry. Do you want to influence the technical standards of your product yourself, or do you voluntarily hand over the task of creating standards to your competitors? They will gladly do it for you.
Benefits
Only by participating in a national standardization group can you fully and actively monitor, anticipate, influence and apply standards that are necessary or otherwise important for your organization and/or its products.
Follow: nowadays, almost without exception, standards are developed outside Finland – through the national standardization group, you will receive more in-depth and accurate information about ongoing standardization projects and entire large-scale standardization programs.
Anticipate: you will know well in advance about upcoming standards and their requirements; you can adapt your own product or operations to comply with new standards before ordinary users of standards even know about the existence of the standard; you can anticipate future global or European trends and possibly develop your own operations accordingly.
Influence: you can comment on proposals under preparation to form a national position or you will actively participate in the preparation of standards in working groups under the ISO/CEN technical committees.
Apply: you will receive important background information for the application of standards and you will be better able to interpret and apply new standards; you will know the important connections between certain standards and legislation.
Membership in a standardization group
Membership of METSTA’s national standardization groups entitles you to participate in the national processing of issues related to the CEN and ISO work of the standardization group in question:
- Personal ID and password for the standardization group’s member pages, which are used to manage the material and other information of the standardization group in question (e.g. proposals related to requests for opinions and the most important preparatory documents at TC/SC level)
- Right to be appointed to CEN and ISO working groups in your area
- Discount on participation fees for seminars organized by METSTA
- Discount on own publications published by METSTA.
Participation fee
The participation fee for the standardization group is €900/national standardization group and entitles you to personal membership in the selected group. Membership will automatically continue for one year at a time, unless you notify us of your intention to terminate it by the end of the current year.
If there are several members from the same company/group in the same national standardization group, the participation fee is as follows:
- 1st member €900
- 2nd member €450
- 3rd member €225/person.
When joining as a member mid-year, the participation fee is reduced as follows:
- After 30 June, €450/end of the year.
Participation fee for representatives of educational institutions
The participation fee for representatives of the Finnish education system (universities, polytechnics, vocational schools) is €300 per year. The above-mentioned discounts for joining mid-year (€150 after 30 June) and for multiple members in the same standardization group (2nd member €150, 3rd member €75/person) are also valid.
Exempt from participation fees
According to the decision of the METSTA Board, the following parties are exempt from the participation fee:
- Members of standardization groups SR 081, SR 089, SR 103, SR 105, SR 106, SR 131, SR 290, SR 371 and SR 406
- Representatives of ministries and consumer, environmental and employee organizations.
Joining a standardization group
Membership of the standardization group is open to all representatives of organizations operating and registered in Finland and Finnish individuals who are concerned by the topics covered by the group.
Participation in METSTA’s national standardization groups requires commitment to the operating rules set out in SFS Guide 5:2023. Participation in working groups preparing Finnish SFS standards requires commitment to the operating rules set out in SFS Guide 4:2023. Please also note METSTA’s supplementary instructions on the operating rules of national standardization groups.
Join a national standardization group by filling out the registration form. Remember to also provide your billing contact information if you are joining a paid standardization group (see information on participation fees above).
In accordance with the practices of international standardization activities, SFS is the data controller for the personal data of ISO and CEN, as well as those participating in or following Finnish standardization.