Hi,

I just wanted to purchase a standard and the woman at the helpdesk told me lots of customers prefer to buy the pure IEC norm, not the EN- or other national implementations of the norm.

She told me sometimes [our] customers were suspicious about standards having other prefixes.

What are your experiences with this? Which ones would you buy?

I thought the IEC was actually just a recommendation, and that it turns into a norm only when preceded by ANSI, EN or other national prefixes.

best regards
t.

Anyone experience this?

If the standard in question is sometimes nationally adopted with national customization, the ISO/IEC version may be the "pure" document...but that version won't be the legally effective standard in those nations that have adopted it with customizations. Those versions would have to be bought in the local versions where you need compliance.

A company with multinational marketing, and a corresponding design/management/quality system, may need multiple versions of various standards to guide its multinational compliance.

In the case of an ISO or ISO/IEC standard adopted as a European standard I can say positively there is NO customization of the normative standard for EU member states. There is something called the Vienna agreement which requires the (English language) standard to be identical. If there is difference of any significance between the respective CEN and ISO drafting committes the standard is not adopted as an EN. The EN versions naturally have forewords added that's all, but the forewords are informative not normative.

Policies of countries outside the EU may differ but that's outside my experience. Language translation anomalies are more controversial.