IAS attends sixth ISO/CASCO WB44 meeting in Geneva

 
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Dr. George Anastasopoulos, IAS director for conformity assessment, attended the sixth International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Committee on Conformity Assessment (CASCO) Working Group 44 (WG 44) meeting that was held on July 10-12 in Geneva, Switzerland. A major deliverable of this meeting was the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) version of the new ISO/IEC Standard 17025. The document is expected to proceed to publication in November or December of 2017.

In this meeting, the working group reviewed the Draft International Stage (DIS) comments with the Drafting Group (DG) observations and focused on the flagged "for discussion" comments. The experts unanimously agreed that technical changes were made to the DIS which, in line with ISO Directives, necessitates the FDIS stage. If the FDIS is approved, the comments collected during the ballot will be handled electronically by the Conveyors and the CASCO Secretariat. The document will then proceed to publication.

Among other issues, the work group discussed and agreed on the following:

  • use Guide 99 ISO/IEC, International vocabulary of metrology — basic and general concepts and associated terms (VIM) as normative reference;
  • the proposal from the DG for the clause on equipment (6.4),
  • the proposal from the DG for the clause on metrological traceability (6.5), part of which was moved to the informative Annex A;
  • the proposal from the DG for the clause 7.1 on review of requests, tenders and contracts, where the content of the clause 7.1.2, dealing with externally provided laboratory activities, was dispatched to other clauses of the standard and the last sentence deleted;
  • the proposal from the DG for the clause 7.6 on evaluation of measurement uncertainty that was discussed and only slightly amended in comparison to the DIS text;
  • to modify the structure of the clause 7.8 on reporting of results and add a sub-title for reporting sampling-specific requirements, in line with a proposal from NEN;
  • to mention the reference material producers (RMPs) and insert some of the text from the previous clause on metrological traceability to the Annex A;
  • to keep the figure B1, illustrating the processes described in Clause 7.