The EA Multilateral Agreement (MLA), signed so far by 43 EA Members, has been managing to go through the pandemic year 2020.
Maria Papatzikou (ESYD, the Greek NAB), Chair of the EA Multilateral Agreement Council (EA MAC), responsible for the effective and impartial management and monitoring of the peer-evaluation process, outlined the MLA activities 2020 as follows:
“Although only few of the scheduled peer evaluations could be finalised in 2020 owing to the COVID-19 outbreak and many of them should have been postponed until next year, the MAC Management Group came up with solutions to maintain the peer-evaluation system operational in compliance with the rules and procedures, and to make decisions without delay to avoid undermining both accreditation and accredited conformity assessment activities. Thus the number of signatories for each scope of the EA MLA remains stable during this period compared to 2019, with even a slight increase in the number of signatories for several scopes. Besides 2 new applications for joining EA MLA signatories were received during 2020 and are being processed.
Moreover peer evaluations against the revised EN ISO/IEC 17011:2017 Conformity Assessment – Requirements for Accreditation Bodies Accrediting Conformity Assessment Bodies were completed by the end of November 2020, end of the 3-year transition period, when all 43 NABs signatories to the EA MLA successfully made the transition from previous version of the standard.
Obviously with fewer completed peer evaluations, the total number of man-days allocated to the peer evaluations performed in 2020 decreased by about 65% compared to the previous year.
The pandemic also led to a slight decrease in the total number of EA evaluators since, notably, the newcomer training scheduled in 2020 should have been put off until 2021. It is expected however that the number of evaluators in each qualification category will increase in 2021 as a result of postponed and scheduled peer evaluations. In order to support the further improvement of EA’s pool of evaluators for a busiest peer-evaluation program in 2021, two remote refresher training sessions concentrated all training efforts in late 2020.
At the International level, EA’s recognition as a regional cooperation body of IAF (International Accreditation Forum) and ILAC (International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation) was confirmed in May 2020. Furthermore EA has increased its recognition of MRA scopes in ILAC. The formal decision on EA’s peer evaluation by ILAC in favour of the extension of its MRA signatory status to the accreditation of reference material producers (RMP) using ISO 17034 was made in April 2020, when EA has become the first regional cooperation body member of the ILAC MRA for accreditation of RMP. EA has also been recognised for the IAF MLA scope extension to ISO/IEC TS 17021-10 and ISO 45001, setting out the requirements with guidance for use for occupational health and safety (OH&S) management systems, as of 5 February 2020.
During 2020, the MLA Council (MAC) has been learning from the unexpected COVID-19 crisis to rethink peer evaluations and decision-making process in a remote perspective in the future. The strongest commitment of all those involved in the EA MLA system, i.e. members of the EA MAC and its Management Group, peer-evaluation teams and trainers, and especially the MAC Secretariat, is helping to meet the substantial and lasting challenges imposed by the pandemic period. I am very grateful for their outstanding contribution to maintaining the EA MLA as both a sustainable and flexible mechanism for ensuring both European and International reliable equivalence and mutual acceptance of certificates and reports issued by accredited conformity assessment bodies. Preserving the confidence in the public service that we provide is our vital role.”