European Accreditation (EA) would like to announce that the EA Multilateral Agreement (EA MLA) Report 2016 is now released.
Foreword of Thomas Facklam, EA Chairman
2016 has been a busy year for the EA Multilateral Agreement Council (MAC) with no less than 19 peer evaluations (PE) planned and completed for a total of 1138 mandays of evaluation, and the starting of the evaluations for the new scope of accreditation of proficiency testing providers with positive results which should allow the launch of the Multilateral Agreement (MLA) in April 2017 as decided by the EA
General Assembly.
At the end of 2016, we are proud to serve 36 Full Members, 13 Associate Members, 38 signatories to the MLA including through a bilateral agreement. During the year, we have relied on 101 assigned team members and 12 trainees, 34 MAC Members appointed in the Task Force Groups for the review of PE reports and 11 MAC Management Group members being involved with the MAC Chair (Paulo Tavares) and Vice Chair (Daniela Ionescu) and the Secretariat in the daily operations of the system. Think that more than 34450 accreditations had been delivered by EA-member national accreditation bodies (NABs) at the end of 2016. Those are just a few numbers to illustrate why and how the EA MLA has been successful.
We have started to put efforts into a number of actions to enhance and facilitate the work done by our evaluators, such as developing a new IT project to facilitate online exchanges for peer evaluation, monitoring of the process, and to strengthen interactions with stakeholders like the U.S. Nuclear Energy Institute and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. An observer from the EA Advisory Board now attends the MAC meetings regularly and gives us valuable feedback supporting continuous improvement of our practices. Moreover, the results of the survey made in 2016 give us guidelines for re-engineering our peer evaluation system and guaranteeing a continuous improvement of our process. As a result of the peer review of EA, ILAC and IAF have renewed their confidence in EA and its members in October 2016 by deciding to maintain EA in their MLA/MRA respectively for testing, medical testing, calibration, inspection, management systems and products certification, and extension for certification of persons.
I would like to sincerely thank all members of the Multilateral Agreement Council, the EA evaluators and the Secretariat of EA for all the energy dedicated and work done during this year to improve our organization and give sense to our main objective: “Accredited once, accepted everywhere”.
EA is at a turn of its history. I trust that we have everything in hand to make another success of the next years.