On the 29^th October 2019 the IAF-ILAC Joint General Assembly (JGA) passed a resolution to establish a single organisation for accreditation based on a survey of Members. This allows for more effective and efficient communication and services as the two organisations already work closely to ensure consistent and complementary services. 

To support the One Organization Project a Steering Committee (SC) was established which executes the project with the support from a contractor reporting to the IAF/ILAC Joint Executive Committee (JEC). This article provides an update on the work to date.

General outline of the new organization

It was confirmed that the new international organization for accreditation would be a worldwide association of accreditation bodies and stakeholder organisations with an interest in the accreditation of conformity assessment bodies such as testing and calibration laboratories, inspection bodies, proficiency testing providers, reference material producers, biobanks, certification bodies for management systems, persons, products, processes and services, verification and validation bodies, with a membership consisting of accreditation bodies and stakeholder organisations throughout the world.

Articles of association

 The draft Articles of Association (AoA) have been through several rounds of review and the next stage will be to further develop these during the JEC meeting on the 8^th November 2022. Progress made at this meeting will be reported back to Members at the JGA. Issues surrounding voting rights will also be considered following Member feedback.

Registration

The SC has reviewed options for the registration of the new body, taking into account political climate, costs, and administrative hurdles, New Zealand is currently being considered and appears to be the best option.

Secretariat

Under the current timelines the secretariat services needed to manage and operate the single organization will be defined and a tender for the new secretariat will be established by the end of 2022.

Next steps of the One Organization Project

As is the nature of international work, we have begun our 3rd year of operation still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic preventing face-to-face meetings. During the pandemic a large pool of items have been handled remotely including revision of almost ten ILAC guides and policies. While we hope that remote meetings will come to an end soon, as there are many challenges that come with remote work, we continue to deal many topics via Zoom meetings.

On the agenda for the meeting 19 April is the:

– Presentation of comments to the draft ILAC G19 for forensics,
– Presentation of the final draft on ILC G24/OIML D10 on calibration intervals developed together with OIML,
– Developments in liaison activities with (among others) the BIPM, OIML, ITU and JCGM,
– Status on the FDIS ISO 15189 expected to arrive May-June 2022; and the
– Status on the DIS ISO 17043 expected to arrive end of April 2022.

This year ISO/IEC 17025:2017 will be 5 years old. That will be celebrated with a workshop at the meeting in Montreal November 2022 allowing thorough discussions on a select number of topics. This includes measurement uncertainty arising from sampling, sampling in calibration, and options A and B for management system and compliance with requirements (and decision rules).

ILAC AIC Chair
Erik Oehlenschlaeger