ISO 17025

Aspen Research is now officially ISO 17025 certified. The certificates finally arrived in the mail yesterday. A lot of people here spent a large amount of time for those sheets of paper that are so precious - or are they? The certificates are 4 sheets of paper obtained with less than a years worth of work. Everybody reading this blog has spent (or is spending) 4 years just for a single piece of paper. [*]

I was not actively involved in the effort, but from the outside looking in, I would explain ISO 17025 vs. ISO 9001 this way. In ISO 9001, you wrote down what you did, you did it and then you write down what you did. The quality of what you did did not matter at all. You could make the same rotten stuff day after day and still be ISO 9001 certified - and there are plenty of companies that operate that way. With ISO 17025, you now have to show how well you do something. It still may be awful, but now it is known to your clients that it is awful.

Note to self: do not ever again work for a company that simultaneously pursues ISO 17025 certification and relocates to a new building.

[*] Some of us were so excited about that arrangement that we repeated that effort! And guess what? We are too. GLP registration is the next target.