APPLICATION OF ISO 17025 – A QUALITY MODEL FOR LABORATORIES

Nouman Ali Khan is presently Executive Director of Alpha Plus Systems. He did BE Aerospace from PAF College of Aeronautical Engineering and MBA Marketing from The International University. He started his career as Maintenance Engineer in PAF in 1982. In 1998 he joined INSPECTEST as Head NDT and Industrial Safety and Training. In 1999 he took over the Quality Control of DESCON and remained there till 2001. In September 2001, Alpha Plus Systems was launched providing services to the industry in the fileds of Inspection, calibration, training and consultancy on ISO 9000, ISO 14000 & ISO 17025.
He has presented papers in many publications and national conferences, including ICQI (PIQC), Pak. Aeronautical Conference , Army Dte. Of Inspections, PWI (PAEC). He is member of BInstNDT, ASME, American Society for Quality, (ASQ), Institute of Engineers, M.IEP and life member of PSNDT.

ABSTRACT

Total Quality Management (TQM) is an approach to doing business that maximizes the competitiveness of an organization through continuous improvement of its products, services, people, processes and environments.  The approach has gained wide spread acceptance across the world.  This paper deals with methodologies through which organizations can apply the TQM philosophy to Safety and Health management; ensuring optimum results in the various HSE programs.  TQM solves the same problem for Safety managers as it solved for the Quality managers; the problem of “isolation”.  To understand the relationship of TQM and Safety, each of the distinguishing characteristics of TQM (like: Customer Focus, teamwork, continuous improvement etc) must be examined from a health and safety perspective.  The phases of implementation come next, which are divided into four parts, namely: Preparation, Planning and Execution.  The twenty-step plan can be called TSM: Total Safety Management.