17025 - I am looking for someone to come in and certify our laboratory equipment

[duckie d]

I am looking for someone to come in and certify our lab equipment to the 17025 standards. Can anyone recomend any services. I need this for melt indexers, scales, moisture analyzers, ovens, gauges, spectrophotometers, weights, and other various things.

 

[Jerry Eldred]

After re-reading your post, I realized it appears you want to get a calibration provider to come in and calibrate your lab instruments on-site to ISO17025.

There are two main places to find those vendors:

1. http://www.a2la2.net/

2. http://ts.nist.gov/ts/htdocs/210/214/scopes/programs.htm

(1) above is A2LA, which accredits the majority of accredited labs in the US. (2) above is the NVLAP web page. You have to make absolutely certain that when you request calibrations from labs listed in those websites that you request "Accredited Calibrations" (i.e.: within the scope of their accreditation). It is not adequate just to use an accredited lab. They are only accredited for individual calibrated parameters. Many labs can calibrate more than what is within the scope of their accreditation. So if you don't assure they give you an accredited calibration, it may just be a normal one, not within their accreditation scope.

It is possible that there are no accredited labs capable of providing accredited calibrations on some things on your list. If that is the case, you can go to the OEM of the instrument (depending on the rules of your compliance). But you will need to document that there are no accredited labs available. I will add one qualifier to this paragraph, that I work within QS9000 (soon to be TS16949) context. Therefore, if you have to comply with some other ISO, federal or other standard, there may be different rules on what to do if there is not an accredited lab available. You'll need to check with your experts on compliance to your applicable standard for that information.

Hope this is of some small help.