Less than one year after having been removed out from the EA website, the EA Search Facility designed to look for information about accredited conformity assessment bodies in Europe is rising from ashes through the EA webpage dedicated to “MLA & BLA Signatories”.
A new search system has been recently made operational for everyone to seek out information about accredited conformity assessment bodies (CABs) directly on the websites of EA Members themselves. Please go to the EA webpage listing MLA and BLA signatories at: http://www.european-accreditation.org/mla-and-bla-signatories and click on “(search)” near the conformity assessment activity for which you would like to find a CAB accredited by one given NAB in one given country to have direct access to the NAB’s database of accredited CABs.
In November 2015, the EA General Assembly, acting upon recommendation from the Communications and Publications Committee (CPC), had indeed decided that the EA Search Facility shall be closed down as of 1 December 2015 (EA Resolution 2015(36)15).
Because the service was lacking, as notably reflected by the daily requests for such European database received by the EA Secretariat, the EA CPC investigated a new way for customers to CABs or third parties to find CABs accredited by EA-member national accreditation bodies (NABs). It was then proposed to develop a system similar to that being already in place for giving access to data on accredited EN ISO 14065 verifiers from the EA homepage:
http://www.european-accreditation.org/information/national-accreditation-bodies-having-been-successfully-peer-evaluated-by-ea
For this purpose, a survey was carried out among EA NABs in August and September 2016 for the EA Secretariat to be provided with the hyperlinks of every NAB’s webpages where to access information on accredited CABs for each scope (testing, calibration, inspection, etc.). All the links have been uploaded on the EA website, on the specific page identifying the EA MLA and BLA signatories.