Risk Management Planning for ISO 17025 Accreditation

 

With the 2017 revision of the ISO 17025 accreditation, labs are expected to implement risk management processes to make sure the overall accuracy of results is not impacted. In earlier versions of the accreditation, this was being addressed via the preventive action protocols but now risk-based thinking pushes labs to take a more strategic look at their risk handling measures. While the accreditation process does not suggest any specific measures to deal with risks and opportunities, there are some commonly set steps for risk planning that could help labs deal with all these uncertain situations. These steps followed in depth should help you set up the right processes to get you the accreditation in one go.

 

1. Identify risks: The base of any strategy setting is exploration. This step is the most crucial one since it builds the base of the entire strategy exercise. To begin risk exploration, it is best to do team-wide brainstorming and discussions. This open forum discussion setting allows people from different departments to voice the various challenges they have faced or anticipate facing and hence gives the leadership a more holistic and ground-level view of possible risks. At this point, you can also involve an ISO 17025 consultant to help you explore and scrutinize your business processes based on past data and performance as well. 
2. Risk evaluation: Every business has a different way of functioning. Depending on how complex your business operations are, you can conduct a qualitative or quantitative analysis of all the risks and opportunities in the business. You could also use 3x3 or 5x5 matrices to assist the calculation of the risk scores and levels. This evaluation helps you understand the low, medium, and high levels of a particular risk. 
   
   
   
   
3. Risk ranking: Once you have all impact levels listed and the whole organization’s opinions notes it’s time to align all the material at hand. This alignment helps you rank all the risks on the basis of the availability of resources to handle them and costs to address them apart from the impact on business. The ranking is an important step since it helps you identify what needs immediate attention and can be addressed right away and what needs not to be prioritized in the strategy.
4. Action planning: Once risks are identified and ranked and the resource planning is in place, it’s time to start working on the plan of action when a risk occurs. These actions could be aimed at eliminating the risk completely, right away, or just keeping things ready when this risk occurs since the cost of taking immediate steps are high as compared to the impact or anticipated frequency of this risk. An ISO 17025 consultancy could play a crucial role here in helping you plan better to address risks.
   
5. Implementation and monitoring: Once plans are set, actions need to be taken. These actions should be constantly monitored and improved wherever necessary as per the results they deliver.

 

These steps help you comprehensively plan for an ISO17025 accreditation. You can however also get ISO 17025 accreditation help from the expert team at Cal Lab Access that constantly strives to help customers achieve 100% results in the first go.

 

3 Easy Ways to Ensure a Smooth 17025 Accreditation

 

The ISO 17025 accreditation is a major step towards the business process streamlining and improving business image for the consumers. This major step hence requires a lot of heavy lifting to bring systems and documentation in place. Not only is it a hectic task to get accredited, but it also requires massive collaboration and planning to happen smoothly. Quality teams need to conduct extensive groundwork to ensure they have a complete gauge of the changes required and the efforts necessary to make them. With companies taking anywhere between 6 months to 4-5 years depending on their size of operations, changes required, and the readiness of plans. Here are 3 things that you should keep in mind to ensure you do not face any hurdles in accreditation.

 

1. Gap analysis and management alignment: These are two of the most important factors in accreditation planning and the best place to start work from. The first step is to get in touch with an ISO 17025 consultancy to get a basic checklist of items needed to complete a scope of accreditation. Using this, a gap analysis should be conducted to understand the misses in the existing system. Next, these gaps must be informed to the leadership to ensure that quality teams work in collaboration with management to successfully plan and execute changes for accreditation.

 

2. Comprehensive change management plan: Now that the gaps are identified and leadership on board, a comprehensive plan must be chalked out to implement the ISO 17025 QMS. This also implies involving staff members since they will be directly impacted by these changes. Instead of making changes to their work, they must be involved in the change management plan to ensure a smooth transition while engaging all levels of the workforce.

 

3. Marketing and awareness: Just assuming that people would know what your ISO accreditation means would be wrong. Most consumers may not fully understand what your accreditation means. This means that investment in marketing your accreditation and making consumers aware about the impact of it is absolutely important. Invest in innovative marketing techniques instead of just a simple letter stating you are accredited.

 

These 3 steps make your journey to accreditation an easy one. It helps you establish a strong base and hence fully capitalize on the power of accreditation. To sail through the process of ISO 17025 Accreditation with minimum friction you can also get help from the experts at Cal Lab Access. Right from gap analysis to helping you prepare a QMS, these experts help you understand the process well and hence reach accreditation quicker.