---

Michelle: So I know the full title is a little longer. It's Reading, Writing, Reviewing Accreditation Scopes, Service Requests, and Calibration Certificates. So could you tell us a little bit about how you came up with the topic and why it's important?

Heather:I absolutely can. Thank you, Michelle. A lot of the labs that I assess as an accreditation assessor as well as those that I consult with have a common challenge and a common frustration in that they think they're getting an accredited calibration and they find out that it's not accredited.

And then they say, OK, well, we'll get an accredited calibration. And they get an accredited maybe test report, or they get the accredited calibration, but it's not for the correct parameters that they needed or the correct accuracy. So it's going beyond the sticker and the cert to make sure that you are getting what you actually need for your equipment. So finding an accredited calibration provider can do the parameters that you need and the ranges that you need and to that level of accuracy that you need for your equipment. And then, so that's reviewing and demystifying the accreditation scopes. And then how do you ask for these calibrations? How do you make these service requests? So you're giving enough information to the calibration provider.

That will reduce your calibration provider's frustration. As having been a calibration provider myself, so many times we would get equipment that somebody would just say, calibrate this. And well, how do you use it? What do you need calibrated on it? Some things were pretty straightforward, but some things weren't. And I often give the example of somebody brought me an oscilloscope and they said, calibrate this.

So I put it on a scale and I weighed it, and then I got out a tape measure and I measured the dimensions. Well, I calibrated it from mass and length, but that wasn't how they used it. Of course, that's not how an oscilloscope is used, but I use it as an example of the calibration vendors need more information and they love it when their customers are clear and detailed in what they want and what they need so the vendor knows, oh, this is what they need, this is what they want, as opposed to calibrate this. And they have to figure out what that customer wants. So in the service request, if you want a calibration interval assigned, you can do that. If you have additional measurement points you want, if you want it calibrated to certain specifications, whether they are manufacturer specifications.

And not only that, if it's manufacturer, is it the one year specifications? Is it a 90 day specification? Or is it to a standard test method, such as ASTM or USP, or an ISO or another type of accepted standard method? And then in the third part, when you get the calibration certificate back, you don't just say, oh, I got the calibration certificate, throw it in a file and you think you're golden. No.

The third part is to teach you how to read and interpret the calibration certificate. What should be on an accredited calibration, an ISO IEC 17025 calibration certificate? And starting with that, what do the different required items to be reported, what do they mean? And what do they mean to you? And how do you use those data? If you have a certificate that makes a statement of conformity and it says, pass, what were the values? Where were the values measured at? What is the associated measurement uncertainty? What is the decision rule that explains how the lab accounted for the measurement uncertainty when making that statement of conformity? Because you can have a measured value and its associated uncertainty.

And there could be a resulting probability that it's called a pass, but it has a high probability it could be a fail and vice versa. So learning how to read the data on it empowers people in their companies to have more defendable data, to know where their risks are, and then they can make the decisions of how they want to mitigate those risks.

And there's a client I'm getting ready to do some training for on those very items. The three topics were individual training presentations that I gave at various conferences. And I saw that there was just a nice flow and linkage between them. And another aspect is how do folks understand what and determine the accuracy that they need for their equipment. And that was a presentation I gave at the Quality Show in 2023 of how do you understand these test methods so you know how accurate your equipment needs to be to meet these test methods. So that was a long answer. Yeah. I know it all sounds very useful. And yeah, I did see that you'd present on these in the past. For past presentations or trainings, are there certain questions people usually ask or is this all kind of surprising to them or are they just kind of confused about the whole kind of process?

Overwhelmingly, the trainings that I've been in presentations that I've given, folks feel empowered by what they've learned and they also are thrilled that it's presented at a level that's very understandable. There's a lot of folks that are rightfully intimidated by the topics.

Like, oh my gosh, calibration, there's a lot there. How do we discern this? And I've gotten a lot of wonderful feedback that I'm able to distill the information in very understandable and easy to apply tools. So I provide a checklist for folks that say when you're reviewing, here is what you need for a calibration certificate. I also provide a template for the service request letter that folks can make their own into their own document control system and edit it how they need it to. But it's a starting place. And these are things that I wish I had learned and been taught early on in my metrology career. So I'm trying to take what I've learned and distill it in easily understood ways and easy to apply ways for folks to provide that pain relief for their measurement headaches.