A Pragmatic Method for Pass/Fail Conformance Reporting that Complies with ANSI Z540.3, ISO/IEC 17025 and ILAC-G8

About this Article
This article by Mike Dobbert was presented at the NCSLI 2009 Symposium and published in the Proceedings..

Abstract

What are the criteria for stating Pass/Fail conformance when calibrating an instrument and comparing the measured results against specifications? The answer depends on regional and regulatory requirements, customer need and other criteria. This requires calibration service providers to be flexible when reporting calibration results which include Pass/Fail conformance statements. This is especially true when serving a global market.

This paper explores the different requirements or guidelines in standards documents, such as ANSI Z540.3-2006, ISO/IEC 17025:2005, ILAC-G8:1996 and EURAMET/cg-15/v.01. Some of these documents are prescriptive, while others provide only minimal guidance subject to interpretation. While many customers simply want to know pass or fail, these differences lead to variations in the Pass/Fail decision point, in the results labels (Pass / Fail versus. Pass / Indeterminate / Fail), and potentially have an effect on the downstream uncertainty analysis.

This paper presents a non-obvious, yet simple method for expressing statements of Pass/Fail conformance. It employs flexible acceptance limits resulting in straight-forward “Pass” and “Fail” conformance labels, with unobtrusive annotation to communicate additional information required by the standards documents. The result is a concise, uniform method flexible enough to satisfy all of the aforementioned standards, regardless of the chosen acceptance limits.

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A Pragmatic Method for Pass/Fail Conformance Reporting

Additional Material

The PowerPoint^® slideshow used at the paper's presentation is also available here.

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