What is the value of accreditation?
Accreditation is a formal recognition of competence. It is commonly thought of as being limited to approval by an accreditation body against the guides and international standards published by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission. This can be a rather narrow view in some situations and markets, where other standards may apply. For international recognition, however, the application of international standards is strongly recommended.
From the point of view of conformity assessment, accreditation is applied to laboratories, inspection bodies and certification bodies. Users of laboratory services are often more familiar with accreditation and have a sophisticated understanding of its value. Accreditation of certification is a more recent activity and, while there has been extraordinary demand for certification, its accreditation is perhaps not so well appreciated. Similarly, accreditation of inspection bodies is a recent development; it is growing in significance as government inspectorates in many countries are reduced and their activity taken over by the private sector.
Accreditation adds value to laboratories and certification bodies as well as to their managements in a number of ways. However, its priority for a particular laboratory, certification body or inspection body depends on the perception of its stakeholders and the market conditions within which they operate.
In any particular market, there will be relatively few certification bodies to be accredited, while the potential number of laboratories to be accredited may be high. This size difference sometimes causes confusion in that the term ‘accreditation’ is occasionally used for ‘certification’, particularly with respect to ISO 9000 certification. It must be remembered that accreditation follows an assessment of competence, while certification is the result of a demonstration of compliance with a standard – in the case of ISO 9000, a quality management system standard.
The owner or management of an enterprise may seek reassurance that, having decided to implement a QMS, the certification body of choice is competent to provide certification services. The accreditation of the certification body would provide reassurance that it is being operated effectively.
The accreditation of a laboratory, by contrast, follows a rigorous investigation into the competence of individual technical staff and an assessment of the management system. Users of laboratory services are concerned most with reliability and accuracy of test data.
A laboratory owner, particularly if it is a large corporation or an absentee investor, may require its laboratories to be accredited to impose a discipline on their management, and to give itself confidence that the laboratories are being operated in a technically competent manner and that the data they produce are reliable.
For the laboratory management itself, the external expert technical assessment undertaken by the accreditation body provides confidence that the laboratory is working to a high level of technical competence and that it is on a par with, or better than, its competitors. It also provides opportunities for improvement in performance and for gaining insights into current developments in its field of work as a result of the interaction between the laboratory staff and the expert assessors.
Accreditation may by itself instill confidence in a customer in a laboratory’s competence and integrity. This is not to say that laboratories that are not accredited are not of a similarly high standard, but that accreditation can take the place of an assessment that would have had to be conducted by an individual customer. For laboratories, accreditation is certainly less intrusive than multiple appraisals by different customers.
In some markets or for particular customers, special requirements are imposed over and above normal accreditation requirements. These will often be administrative in nature, but may also have technical elements such as participation in specific proficiency-testing programmes. In these situations, the customer sometimes undertakes an evaluation according to these special requirements, and in so doing imposes another form of accreditation. In other cases, the customer may ask the accreditation body to cover the additional requirements in its assessment of the laboratories on which the requirements have been imposed. This additional assessment may then be included in the scope of the accreditation.
In some countries where, for instance, a particular regulatory regime demands accreditation or where an industry has adopted accreditation as standard practice, it may be difficult, even impossible, to do business without accreditation. In these countries, accreditation becomes a de facto licence to operate. Examples of these situations can be found in Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Such policies may cover laboratories and certification bodies.
It is often stated that accreditation is either an unnecessary cost or too costly. In some circumstances this may be so. However, for most laboratories, the accreditation costs are small compared with the costs of complying with standards which, it can be argued, have be met in any case. The accreditation process imposes a discipline which is a tool for good management. Accreditation also eliminates many hidden costs associated with confidence-building in the market and with maintaining that confidence on a continuing basis.
Further information is available from:
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International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC)
c/o NATA, 7 Leeds Street, Rhodes, NSW 2138, Australia. Tel: +61 2 9736 8374, Email: ilac@nata.asn.au, Internet: www.ilac.org; |
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International Accreditation Forum (IAF),
IAF Secretariat, Suite 1801, 2 Marcus Clarke Street, Canberra City ACT 2601, Australia,
Tel: +61 2 6257 1962, Fax: +61 2 6257 1965, Email: adviser@accreditationforum.com, Internet: www.iaf.nu;
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What are Mutual Recognition Agreements and how do they facilitate trade?
This is a somewhat confusing issue in that there are a number of different terms for the same type of agreement, or the same terms may be used for different arrangements. Mutual recognition agreements may be at three levels:
 Political agreements between governments (sometimes of treaty status); |
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Agreements between accreditation bodies; |
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Agreements between individual laboratories and certification bodies. |
There is some confusion in the terminology, which needs to be understood. Initially, all such instruments were called ‘agreements’, but in recent years government-to-government treaties and the like have been called ‘agreements’, and there has been pressure on the voluntary sector to use alternative terms for their arrangements.
In Europe, the multilateral agreement among the accreditation bodies of the European cooperation for Accreditation is referred to as a multilateral mutual recognition agreement, abbreviated as MLA. A similar agreement between the member bodies of APLAC is called a multilateral mutual recognition arrangement or MRA. The multilateral agreement among ILAC members is known as the ILAC Mutual Recognition Arrangement, and its only short form is Arrangement.
Similarly, Mutual Recognition Agreements have been developed for mutual recognition among bodies accrediting quality management system certification/registration bodies. As for the laboratory accreditation bodies, an agreement exists at the international level for certification bodies through the International Accreditation Forum, and at the regional level through bodies such as EA and PAC (Pacific Accreditation Cooperation). The IAF Multilateral Recognition Arrangement is abbreviated as IAF MLA.
As of today, there are no agreements covering accreditation of product certification bodies, although work is under way in this area.
Originally, Mutual Recognition Agreements between accreditation bodies were bilateral in nature and individual accreditation bodies often had many such bilateral partners. As the networks expanded, it was realized that a much more cost-effective system would be multilateral arrangements in which single formal evaluations were performed by small teams representative of the whole network, rather than multiple evaluations by each member of each other.
These mutual recognition agreements/arrangements are formal agreements between accreditation bodies that acknowledge that the accreditations (of laboratories and certification bodies) granted by all parties to the particular agreement are equivalent. The parties to that agreement undertake to promote this equivalence within their respective markets.
Such agreements have their biggest economic impact in countries that use accreditation as the mechanism of choice for the recognition of laboratories and certification bodies for regulatory purposes.