Laboratory Accreditation Services for Testing and Calibration Laboratories

With trade barriers falling, and even the smallest businesses becoming increasingly international in scope, accreditation of your testing or calibration laboratory to the ISO 17025 standard has become more important than ever. At TÜV Rheinland, we can help you achieve this important goal.

TÜV Rheinland enjoys a worldwide reputation for quality and service as a provider of product safety testing and certification, and management systems registrations. By combining our technical expertise with our global reach, you get the experience your business needs and your customers deserve.

Our Laboratory Accreditation Service (LAS) is a process whereby TÜV Rheinland assesses and, ultimately, certifies the technical competence of a testing or calibration laboratory to provide testing or calibration services to its customers in accordance with the requirements of ISO 17025. ISO 17025 can be thought of as a technically rigorous application of ISO 9001 to a testing or calibration laboratory. Whereas ISO 9001 is a general standard that can be applied to any organization, ISO 17025 is ISO 9001 tailored to a testing or calibration laboratory. It includes all of the requirements of ISO 9001:1994. It does not include all requirements of ISO 9001:2000, although there is a revision in the works that will do so.

ISO 17025 was released in 1999, replacing a prior standard called ISO Guide 25. ISO Guide 25 included some of the requirements of ISO 9001:1994, but not all. The technical requirements were increased as well. Where an ISO 9001 audit team includes people with the general industry code to audit a customer, an ISO 17025 assessment team includes not only one or more quality systems auditors, but also includes technical expertise in the specific tests or calibrations performed by the customer. There are rules for qualifications that are more stringent for ISO 17025 than for ISO 9001.