A2LA Today l June 2017 l Number 135
By Trace McInturff, A2LA Senior Director, Accreditation Services
CASCO ISO/IEC 17025 WG44 held its second drafting group (DG) meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on May 1 – 3, 2017 at the NRC office. 18 delegates were in attendance. A2LA was represented by Trace McInturff, Senior Director, Accreditation Services. The objective of this DG was to pre-scan the comments collected during the ballot on the ISO/IEC DIS 17025 and make observations and proposals to the entire working group (WG), to facilitate its work in the upcoming WG meeting 6. This meeting will take place 10 – 12 July 2017 at the ISO office in Geneva, Switzerland to complete the DIS comment review to produce ISO/IEC FDIS 17025. The illustration below displays where we are in the process:
Figure 1. ISO Process
The DIS ballot yielded over 1800 comments. Due to the number and nature of the comments from the voting members, the conveners and the CASCO Secretariat concluded it would be appropriate to transfer the document from the DIS to the FDIS stage rather than bypassing FDIS and pushing forward to the International Standard (IS). The DG met to review, deliberate, update and provide preliminary responses to the WG in the draft FDIS. Given the significant number of comments, not all technical comments were reviewed by the DG. In summary, the following sections will be reviewed by the entire Working Group: 6.6; 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, 7.10, 7.11, all of 8 and the Annexes.
The corresponding time frame from DIS to FDIS and FDIS to IS is less certain. Following the July WG meeting the ISO Secretariat and his team will edit the draft FDIS, send it out for translation into French and Russian, the two other “official” languages, before the 8-week FDIS ballot. One would anticipate the publication date of the International Standard, possibly, somewhere in early 2018.