ISO 17025
LABORATORIES
We can help you attain and maintain ISO 17025 Certification for your laboratory; writing procedures around your methods, calculating uncertainty budgets and coaching laboratory management.
How can we help?
We can create suitable documentation for you to guide your laboratory staff to implement good practice, and also keep down your laboratory overheads.
We can provide Measurement Uncertainties coaching and calculation, performed to M3003.
Practical Metrology taught as needed to ensure accurate and repeatable testing and calibrations are performed.
We’ll provide Laboratory Quality Manager Services to maintain laboratory processes compliance with ISO 17025.
We have extensive experience working with both test and calibration laboratories.
If you have fallen behind on implementing the Laboratory Management System we can help you catch up and get right back on target.
ISO 17025 CLIENTS
Q+A
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This is the international standard defining how a test or calibration laboratory should be managed. It fundamentally looks for accurate and repeatable measurements to be made and recorded. The standard contains a number of rules to help you avoid making erroneous measurements.
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Organisations and companies purchase formal testing and calibration to demonstrate to their clients their products or services deliver what they say they do. Hence they want professional laboratories to perform the tests and so ISO 17025 accreditation is evidence of professional testing or calibration.
Government and other authorities also want professional testing to demonstrate those suppliers are delivering to a requirement. A well known example of this is National Weights and Measures in the UK . It is common for product safety or EMC to be tested in ISO 17025 approved laboratories.
There are research laboratories that are working at the leading edges of technology and so want excellent testing or calibration and hence use ISO 17025 as the foundation of their laboratory management systems.
If you want to discuss this more, then please contact us. -
Any laboratory that tests, measures or calibrates and wants to demonstrate they operate in a professional way.
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In my experience it has either been the laboratory's management team wanting to achieve it or the laboratory's clients that have asked them to obtain it. It will typically take 5 months to achieve ISO 17025 accreditation but can be implemented in under one month. There are also the costs to be considered. If you want to discuss these contact Winning Solutions.
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Creating a laboratory management system is the first stage. This is often done by a consultant as laboratory management and staff are often busy performing work for customers.
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Yes. Winning Solutions can provide laboratory quality Manager activities to perform audits, reviews, document control, customer feedback and implementation of actions to EN ISO 17025.
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Yes, we normally start one month before an annual assessment date and can recover enough of the year's management system to successfully get through the annual UKAS assessment without any major non-conformities.
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There have been various national laboratory standards in existence for over 40 years. The UK had a standard call M10 that was published by NAMAS the predecessor to today's UKAS. In 1999 ISO/IEC published the first international version where much of the UK national standard was incorporated. This was revised in 2004 and published in 2005. Then revised again in 2017 to be in line with the ISO 9001:2015. The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) adopted this standard making it a European Norm, so it is now called EN ISO/IEC 17025 in Europe.
The consequence of it becoming an EN means that all national standards covering the same scope had to be withdrawn and everyone in Europe is to use the ISO 17025.
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Many national standards sell paper or electronic editions of ISO 17025 and the price does vary so it is worth shopping around. Standards websites worth looking at include:
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Yes. two of our Laboratory Consultants are trained in uncertainty calculation using the UKAS M3003 system. But remember that uncertainties are focused on the 95% probable results and you can still occasionally get an outlier.
