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.