Standards and Conformity Assessment Editing and Proofreading Services

Conformity assessment rests on a chain of written claims, each of which must mean exactly what the next link assumes it means. A laboratory holds an accreditation for specific tests; a certification body issues a certificate against a defined scheme; a manufacturer places a mark on a product; a purchaser relies on the mark. If any document in that chain describes its scope loosely, the reliance at the end is misplaced, and nobody discovers it until something fails and the certificate turns out not to have covered the thing that failed.

We edit what standards bodies, accreditation bodies, certification bodies and testing laboratories produce — certification scheme documents and their rules, accreditation scope statements and schedules, test methods and laboratory procedures, test reports and certificates of conformity, inspection reports and audit findings, management system audit reports and nonconformity statements, surveillance and recertification documentation, mark usage rules and licence agreements, competence and personnel certification requirements, proficiency testing documentation, guidance for applicants and clients, appeals and complaints procedures, and mutual recognition and peer evaluation material. Our editors check that scope statements say precisely what is covered and, equally, what is not.

The scope statement is the load-bearing sentence in the entire system and is written with startling looseness. A certificate stating that a product "conforms to EN 12345" leaves open which parts of the standard, which variants of the product, which production sites, which date of issue of the standard, and whether the assessment covered ongoing production or a single sample. We rewrite these so scope names the exact standard with its year and any amendments, identifies the product by model or type designation rather than by family name, states the sites covered, specifies which clauses or annexes were assessed where partial assessment occurred, and — the omission that causes the most trouble — states what is excluded. We apply the same discipline to accreditation schedules and nonconformity statements, where a finding described as "documentation inadequate" gives an auditee nothing to correct and gives the next auditor nothing to verify. Precision here is not pedantry; it is the entire product.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including client information, audit findings and scheme documents in development. We are editors rather than assessors, auditors or technical experts, and we offer no view on conformity, competence or the interpretation of any standard. What we can do is make scopes, findings and scheme documents exact and consistent.