How can ISO/IEC 17025 affect the "daily Work" of a laboratory and the analisys market?

Hello Dear Water and Wastewater treatment professionals.

Here is a interesting issue involving quality assurance on environmental analysis. How can you really be sure about the tests results that your company is receiving from the lab? How can you be a 100% secure about your analytical data? Well, here is the answer.

When you contract a laboratory that is acreditated by ISO/IEC 17025 standard (currently in the 2005 version), you havesure that your analitycal data are being produced under a very hard quality monitoring process, attending to:

- customer and legalrequirements;

- Datatraceability;

- Analitycal standards;

- Apropriate resources and Methods;

- Full analitycal process control and monitoring.

This scenario introduce a complete change on the way how to think about environmental analytical data, because it permits the client to choose a higher quality standard service and identify the low quality service laboratories. In Brazil, the environmental authority does not accept environmental data from non accredited labs. That fact bring more confiability to the labs services, and also increases the competition between them.

For more information, I recomend the above links:

http://www.qualitydigest.com/may05/articles/05_article.shtml

www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=39883

So, how this standard affect your "daily" laboratory routine?

I hope to hear from you about this issue soon. Best Regards!

Léo.