National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) has organized a seminar to explain standards NABL 131 (Terms and Conditions for Obtaining and maintaining NABL Accreditation) and NABL 133 (Policy for Use of NABL Symbol and/or Claim of Accreditation by Accredited Conformity Assessment Bodies (CAB) & NABL Accredited CAB Combined ILAC MRA Mark) to all the newly accredited laboratories / institutes. Senior Management member, Technical Manager or Quality Manager from each institute that obtained accreditation recently, were invited to the seminar. Dr. AVR Reddy, CEO and Mahesh Gaonkar, Head R&D represented GII.

Chakravarthy T. Kannan, Secretary General, Dr. Anita Rani, Director, Dr. Pankaj Johri, Director and Dr. Rahul Jain, Deputy Director were on the Dias. Dr, Rahul Jain coordinated the event and addressed the participants by giving the outline of the seminar. Seminar was aimed at giving guidelines to various aspects of utilizing the accreditation certificate. Dr. Chakravarthy, Secretary General and CEO has explained that these monthly seminars. were started to provide clarification to the management members of newly accredited institutes. He told that many a confusion exit that the certificate can be used for all the work / tests that an accredited institute carries out.

Senior Director and others conveyed that NABL would come forward to clarify queries through email, WhatsApp and their website and encouraged participants to use e-platforms for communications with NABL They urged participants to express genuine concerns in the feedback cum interaction session that followed, rather than appreciating NABL.

Participants with varying background like testing, chemical labs, mechanical industries, medical product suppliers, pathology labs, materials testing labs of different materials and testing and certifying and laborites like GII interacted with each other and NABL personnel. Most of the participants expressed the difficulties in the criteria of deciding non-conformances which were generally different than what were explained at the end of auditing.

NABL authorities clarified clearly that finalization of NCs is based on the input given by auditors which will be converted to an NABL frame work before communicating to the institutes ad hence some minor differences could be there. They clarified all the queries. Dr. Reddy while appreciating the NABL efforts, brought to the notice the difficulties on a few aspects like inter laboratory comparison (ILC) exercise and, making standards of finished products like polished diamonds, studded jewellery and coloured gemstones. He also conveyed that BIS has already made a draft standard for jewellery, was on their site for receiving comments and is now closed for finalization on the basis of comments they received. He is very hopeful that method validation could be taken care off by following the proscribed methodology provided in the finalized standard.

NABL authorities appreciated and assured that they would look into this. Pankaj Johri, Senior Director later met Dr. Reddy, CEO, GII and Mahesh Goankar, Head, R&D, and requested to initiate an exercise on ILC by contacting like-minded institutes. After completing this interesting interactive session, all the institutes were felicitated with Accreditation certificates.

It was followed by another session in which Ramprasath, Joint Director explained both the standards NABL131 and NABL 133 and dos and don'ts regarding utilization of accreditation certificate, NABL symbol and the preview of the certificate. It was followed by another presentation by Dr. Anita Rani, Director who clarified various queries and spoke about awareness about NABL initiatives (Quality Setu, Call Center, Zoho etc.). All the participants were encouraged to apply for integrated accreditation having got initial experience and awareness. Seminar ended after a group photo of all the participants with NABL authorities was taken (given below). Our participation has been extremely useful.

Courtesy : AOJ Desk News