Competence and commitment are essential aspects of customer-friendly services. Without compromise we pursue to develop the quality and continuity of our quality management system in accordance with the ISO 9001 standard in order to serve our customers.
Since 1995, our laboratory test methods have been accredited. In August 2013, we obtained the extension of the accreditation type C according to the ISO/IEC 17025 standard. Thus, new measurement methods according to international standards as well as in-house validated methods may be developed and offered as accredited services to meet customer needs.
ISO 9001 certification of the Quality system
The RMS possesses a quality certificate according to the ISO 9001 standard. The most recent certificate was issued by QS Zurich AG.
Accreditation
Since 1995 the services of our testing laboratory have been accredited according to ISO/IEC 17025 by the Swiss Accreditation Service (SAS). Since August 2013 the accreditation includes the type C accreditation. This accreditation is based on defined technologies and measurement principles and enables the laboratory to include new procedures in the scope of the accreditation without prior assessment as long as technologies and measurement principles already established in the laboratory are used.
Myriam Herger (Head of Quality Management & Support Services, member of the executive board)
Every result of an analysis is subject to a measurement uncertainty, because the measured value only represents an estimate of the true (unknown) value due to limitations such as display accuracy, signal noise, or environmental influences.
If a measured value is used to make a statement regarding compliance with a specified tolerance limit (statement of conformity), this decision can be made either with or without consideration of the measurement uncertainty.
ISO/IEC 17025:2018 requires accredited testing laboratories to make statements of conformity based on a defined decision rule. This rule must be communicated to the customer and is applied unless the standard or technical specification on which the statement of conformity is based specifies a different decision rule.
RMS Foundation reports an extended measurement uncertainty Uk=2 for a confidence interval of 95% for all measurement results. In some cases, the information can be provided on request. Unless otherwise specified or agreed, statements of conformity are made by RMS Foundation on the basis of a simple decision rule. This means that the measurement uncertainty is not taken into account in the decision. Measurement results are rounded to the number of decimal places specified in the standard or technical specification before conformity is assessed. As illustrated in the following graph, only the measured value, or the mean value of a multiple measurement, must be within the acceptance interval (A-B) to pass the conformity assessment. Measured values outside the acceptance interval fail the assessment (D-E).
If a measured value lies exactly on the tolerance limit (C), it passes the assessment if the tolerance limit represents an acceptable minimum or maximum value, or if the acceptance interval includes the tolerance limit (≥ or ≤). Otherwise, the measured value fails the conformity assessment. Without a clear indication of the role of the tolerance limit, measured values in case C pass the conformity assessment.
The probabilities for false positive declarations of conformity (error probability) arising from these decision rules are tabulated below for the 5 different cases A-E. On test certificates with a statement of conformity, RMS Foundation notes the applied decision rule in each case.
