Bottom-line thinking: these 3 mistakes must not be made in the laboratory

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3 common mistakes that laboratories should avoid at all costs: 1. Conducting tests beyond the laboratory’s capabilities – Laboratories, or individual staff within them, may carry out tests on products that are outside their capacity limits in order to meet customer demands or to gain financial benefits, issuing test reports with corresponding labels； Or laboratory personnel may assume that using certain individual standards specified in the standards falls within their capabilities, and mistakenly test the product and issue a test report with relevant markings. In recent years, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, the Certification and Accreditation Administration, and provincial and municipal quality supervision bureaus have imposed very strict penalties for conducting tests beyond their authorized scope; in some cases, they even suspended the testing activities of certain laboratories. Therefore, the laboratory should inform all employees about the consequences of conducting tests beyond the specified limits, and must not deliberately carry out such tests for financial gain or under the pretense of acting in the best interests of the company ； At the same time, the laboratory should also carefully assess its scope of capabilities; for standards that indeed require specific equipment and testing capabilities but are not currently within that scope, efforts should be made as soon as possible to expand such capabilities in order to improve its ability to serve enterprises. 2. Capability verification was not carried out in a timely manner after the standard changes. In recent years, standard changes have been very frequent, whether it comes to product standards or method standards. In accordance with the requirements of the laboratory accreditation assessment criteria, the documents used by a laboratory must be current and valid; therefore, the laboratory cannot use obsolete standards for conducting tests. If a laboratory operates in accordance with new standards, it must promptly go to the authority responsible for accreditation of laboratories and/or CNAS recognition to apply for a standard change. Currently, some laboratories, out of concern for the hassle, tend to wait until re-evaluation or surveillance evaluation to make standard changes. If testing is carried out in accordance with the new standards between the start of implementation of those standards and the completion of a laboratory re-evaluation or surveillance audit, it constitutes testing outside the scope. There is also a case involving a hidden range of superpowers. When the laboratory’s testing capability is approved, it actually implies that the standards referenced in the product standards have also passed the laboratory’s evaluation. When there are changes in the referenced standards, especially when there are actual changes in testing methods or environmental facilities, the actual testing capability for product inspection may change as well. Such a change may prevent the laboratory from carrying out testing activities in accordance with the currently valid standards. We call this type of change an “implicit” out-of-scope test. Due to the need for reconfirmation of competence following any changes in standards, some laboratories, wishing to avoid the hassle, often wait until a surveillance audit or re-assessment to carry out this confirmation. This, in turn, leads to testing that exceeds their scope of competence. Therefore, laboratories should pay attention to and avoid such situations; new standards must not be used for testing until their competence has been confirmed. Laboratories should pay even more attention to changes in the standards referenced in product standards, to avoid using obsolete standards for testing, which could lead to incorrect test results and associated testing risks. 3. Misuse of CNAS and CMA labels: Many laboratories have obtained CNAS accreditation as well as the CMA certification for laboratory qualifications, but these two accreditations are not granted at the same time. When applying for expansions or changes to standards, it is common for one of them to be approved while the other still requires some time before it can be accredited. In some laboratories, especially smaller and medium-sized ones, their capabilities are primarily recognized under CMA and CAL standards; the scope of recognition under CNAS is very limited. Generally, all these certifications are printed directly on the cover of the test report, which leads to laboratories misusing these identifiers. Therefore, the laboratory should print test covers according to the respective passing capability ranges and use them as specified.