IAF – ILAC Mid-Year meetings 2015
The International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC) held their mid-term committee meetings in Frankfurt, Germany from 9 - 12 April 2015. As a full member of IAF and ILAC, SAC participated in some of these committee meetings to monitor the accreditation, conformity assessment related issues being discussed and to ensure that Singapore’s interest are taken into account.
At the ILAC meetings, one of the key discussions was on the revision of ISO/IEC 17025, which is the standard for testing and calibration laboratories. It will incorporate the new high level structure of ISO CASCO (see below) and the first committee draft is targeted to be out for comment by August 2015. SAC will closely monitor the progress, seek and collate comments from accredited laboratories at the appropriate juncture, and work through our national Standards Body and ILAC for the development of this new standard.
At the IAF meetings, there was much deliberation on the new ISO 9001 expected to be published in September 2015. There was discussion to harmonise the different approaches by accreditation bodies (ABs) in assessing certification bodies (CBs) for the transition to ISO 9001:2015. SAC will continue to seek guidance from IAF working group on the requirements for transition and communicate our approach to the accredited certification bodies in due course. The co-convener of Product Certification working group has urged members to feedback on the difficulties encountered by ABs and CBs during the implementation of ISO/IEC 17065. Accredited CBs are welcomed to provide feedback to SAC secretariat by the next PAC meeting in mid June 2015.
ISO CASCO structure
- Scope
- Normative References
- Terms and definitions
- General requirements
- Structural requirements
- Resource requirements
- Process requirements
- Management requirements
Annex A - Nominal cross-references to ISO 9001:2015
Annex B - Guidelines for establishing applications for specific fields