Re: Auditor has rejected our verification - Calibration in 17025:2005
Hi everybody,
External calibration has not been arranged since last year. Our equipment has been verified through our in-house verification plan. (External calibration date has been overdue for almost six months) but auditor has rejected our verification.
Could we verify our equipment in house?
Can guru provide some insight on this subject?
You are allowed to verify your equipment in-house. The equipment must be verified against a standard traceable to NIST.
You say you have an in-house verification plan. Is the plan documented? Does it meet the requirements? Is there a system to identify the calibration status of the equipment? Is the equipment uniquely identified?
You say the external calibration is overdue. Is this shown by a label on the equipment or on the calibration certificate? Does your verification plan include placing a calibration label on the equipment which supersedes the other label?
Let's say you buy a gage which is calibrated by the OEM. It arrives with a cal. cert and has a sticker on it showing the next cal. due date (let's say it is due in 6 months). If you now enter the gage into your calibration system, the rules established in your system would now control the calibration status. Your system states this gage is due for calibration in 1 year. You would remove the OEM sticker and replace it with your internal sticker showing the due date. One year later you would pull the gage and verify it against an NIST traceable standard and put it back in use with a new sticker showing it was due in another year. The alternative would be to send it out for calibration and use their sticker to show the status.
For the purpose of meeting the requirements of the standard, calibration and verification become synonymous. The calibration status is the same in both cases. You don't need to have stickers that say "verified" and/or "calibrated". The tricky part is to determine what will work for your purposes. Can you rely on in-house verification or do you need to send it to the experts? This decision can be defined in your in-house calibration system.
If you follow a documented calibration system that meets the requirements of the standard, the auditor should be ok with it. If you have no documentation or no traceable standards I can see where he would have a problem.
If I didn't manage to address your question, please elaborate a little more on what the auditor said and we will see if we can help.
Dave