ISO/IEC 17025 Accreditation

The Problems

Organizations with laboratories involved in first, second, and third party testing are required to provide evidence of competence to perform testing and/or calibration. These organizations use the requirements stated in the ISO/IEC 17025 standard (General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration requirements) to develop their quality management, administrative and technical operation systems. It can be challenging to develop the necessary documentation and evidence needed to achieve your registration goal.

Do these problems sound familiar?

I am not ready to pass an ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation audit.
I can’t find the correct documentation to perform my tasks.
My document does not meet the requirements of the ISO/IEC 17025 standard.
My company spends too much money on accreditation efforts.
I need to bring my documentation up to the current version of the standard.
My company struggles keeping documents up to date when revisions are required
My company isn't always able to locate the records we need when we have a customer inquiry about a test/calibration that we performed.

The Needs

Organizations seeking ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation must be able to must successfully execute the following:

Development of “audit ready” documentation – Solid documentation must include a policy manual, procedures and instructions covering the requirements in the standards with traceability to the stated requirements and objective evidence to support that the documentation is being followed.
Enforce document control – Successful document control means that you can do the following things well: Revision control, document access, routing, approval and change impact analysis. Besides control, a document must be easy to find and retrieve by the intended user of its contents.