The Singapore Standards Council (SSC) has announced that new standards for growing businesses areas such as drones, additive manufacturing and video analytics can be expected. These standards have been developed with the aims of developing and adopting the latest innovations in Singapore.
The SSC made this announcement during a media briefing on July 15. Over 40 new standards would be developed from April 2019 to March 2020 and over 900 organisations are expected to adopt them.
SSC, which was set up Enterprise Singapore (ESG), works with industry, academia and government organisations to evaluate and develop standards in Singapore.
“The adoption of standards has enabled Singapore companies to uplift their capabilities in terms of improving productivity, facilitating innovation and meeting international benchmarks for practices, systems and performance. This in turn helped Singapore earn the trust of businesses and partners around the world and enhanced its position as a trusted hub for businesses,” said ESG and SSC in a press release.
Some of the new standards being implemented
In an earlier OpenGov article, it reported about a recent standard that was launched for the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles (AV). TR 68, as it is called, was developed to promote safe deployment of fully autonomous vehicles in Singapore.
It covered four key areas of AV deployment which were mainly: vehicle behaviour, vehicle functional safety, cybersecurity and data formats. It went into details of the speed at which AVs should travel at and the space between them on the road.
This standard supports the pilot deployment of AVs in Punggol, Tengah and Jurong Innovation District in the early 2020s. This standard provides vehicle developers such as ST Engineering with clear guidelines which are benchmarked against international standards.
Other standards under development relate to how drones can be used to inspect buildings, design guidelines and test methods for additive manufacturing and deployments of video analytics and surveillance by the security industry.
Why these new standards
Choy Sauw Kook, ESG Director-General of quality and excellence said that standards push for an improvement in the quality of products and services. This allows companies to be able to match up or do even better than international standards and thus grow their business overseas.
“My hope is that companies leverage on standards as a strategic tool to help them differentiate and compete more efficiently on the global stage,” she said.
These standards also support industry transformation and make way for emerging areas and innovation.
Next step forward
SSC Chairman Robert Chew said that in the next step forward, standards would be developed for new areas identified initiatives such as the Industry Transformation Maps and Smart Nation push. SSC would also help to shape international standardisation by participating in international standard-setting bodies such as the International Standards Organisation.
