Accreditation: from complaints to compliance to compliments

The annual accreditation meeting is over and, as with previous editions your mood has not improved. Despite the best efforts of you and your team in recent weeks, the audit revealed a number of non-conformities. Again. On a day like this, you can imagine what organizations must go through that normally come to you for an audit. After all, how on earth are you going to comply with these increasingly stringent requirements?

Global quality standards

These stricter requirements originate, among other things, from global quality standards such as NEN-EN-ISO/IEC 17020 and 17065. While the first standard mainly tests the expertise and independence of your certification body, the second standard focuses on your management system and technical skills. According to another standard, 17021, the process for conducting audits must also be transparent for control purposes. Deep down inside you know you meet all the requirements, but somehow it is very difficult to demonstrate this quickly and at minimal cost.

Forget average scores

During a moment of reflection, a wise lesson of turning a setback into an advantage comes to mind. Instead of aiming for an average score with a minimum of effort and a lot of stress each year, it is of course much smarter to set up all your systems and processes once and for all in such a way that you are above the norm on all fronts at any time throughout the year. In addition to the aspects already mentioned, you also include other accreditation criteria, such as competence management, qualifications, the certification decision paper, demonstrability of the internal quality system and even calculation hours related to important valuables.

Highly automated

While you’re at it, you want even more, including:

• A process in which all steps, controls and quality steps are highly automated and demonstrably recorded.
• Proper recording and active management of all competencies and qualifications that are an integral part of your planning and ongoing operations.
• A dashboard that temporarily shows where you can start deviating from requirements (and thus also from the expectations of your customer).
• A simple way of recording and applying all the variables to create a correct quotation, calculation of hours and allocation of the audit.

Minimum investment thanks to SaaS software

At Zertic, meeting accreditation requirements is on the agenda all the time. Together with our customers we develop new functionality to make sure that that you continue to meet all existing and new requirements, and that the efficiency keeps increasing. ‘That must be very expensive then’, we can already hear you thinking. However, with our SaaS software and affordable user subscriptions, for once the costs do not come before the benefits. This software, which has primarily been developed for streamlining and extensively automating all certification processes of certifying bodies like yours, can be easily adapted to accreditation purposes. Find out for yourself how Zertic can help you reduce the compliance burden and make your processes much more efficient.