Standards on Scope Project for Certification Bodies – Project Cancelled

Bulletin date:
Bulletin number:
2017-14

Affected customers

All Standards Council of Canada (SCC) accredited CAB’s participating in the Certification Body Accreditation Program (CBAP).

 

Background

As an accreditation body, SCC must describe the scope for which certification bodies are accredited. Over the years, the presentation of the scopes has evolved from a very short paragraph description, to the use of ICS (International Classification for Standards) codes to examining the merits of listing the certification standards on the scopes of accreditation.  A multi-year project was initiated to consider converting the CB scopes to a new format that lists standard.  SCC customers and various stakeholders were informed of this development to which there were mixed reviews.

 

Project Status

SCC began receiving draft standards on scopes from its accredited CBs to study and determine what equivalency existed against approved scopes presented according to ICS codes. This exercise proved to be time consuming for both SCC and CBs involved and quickly pointed to a number of issues/barriers that could be faced upon implementation.  In parallel to this exercise, SCC has been developing a Business Management Solution (BMS) that will be very soon used to support the accreditation process including the publication of scopes.  Recently, an evaluation of the feasibility of implementing standards on scopes with the BMS was carried out and concluded that it would not be possible to operationalize it in an efficient manner both from a SCC and a customer perspective. 

 

For these reasons, SCC has cancelled the Standards on Scope project.

 

Decision on Presentation of Scopes Today

SCC will NOT be moving to listing standards on scopes for accredited CBs within the CBAP program and ICS codes will remain one of the tools used to describe the scope of accreditation. CBs are reminded that it is a requirement of their accreditation to have available upon request the list of standards they use for accredited certification so SCC encourages the CBs to maintain their list so it remains current.

 

Questions?

Please contact Cynthia Milito - Director, Accreditation Services, at cynthia.milito@scc.ca or +1 613 238 3222 for more information.