Quality Pays Off: European Service Lab Receives ISO Accreditation

January 24, 2024

OphirBlog

What an excitement when we finally received the confirmation that all our worldwide service and calibration centers are now ISO/IEC 17025 accredited! The accreditation of the European calibration and service center – as the last international puzzle piece missing – covers MKS Ophir’s photodiode, pyroelectric, and thermopile laser power and energy sensors, as well as its power and energy displays and virtual meters.

Continuous improvements

A significant step towards the accreditation of our lab in Darmstadt was taken with the reconstruction and redesign of our facilities back in 2019. The different benches got optimized and a new high-power bench featuring a 3 kW laser was installed to enable the calibration of our high power product range such as the Helios power measurement device.

Due to the expansion of the facilities, new members joined the highly experienced technicians in the Darmstadt team. In a strong global team effort, the accreditation was successfully achieved ensuring that equipment and calibration standards used in Ophir’s calibration laboratories are regularly calibrated by other ISO/IEC 17025 certified, and NIST traceable laboratories and the uncertainty values communicated to customers have a solid foundation based on rigorous experimental and statistical analysis.

Quality management

Important to receive the ISO accreditation is not only the high-quality of the technical process of calibrating the sensors, it’s also about the detailed organizational process documentation behind the scenes. Our quality politics in general is defined in our Quality Handbook. In order to get the accreditation, it is key to develop, review and enforce a quality management system. In a joint effort our lab teams worldwide have worked on the smartest way to process all calibrations and to optimize the documentation process.

After having received the accreditation, all calibration certificates of sensors, displays and virtual meters automatically include the ISO certification. There is no need for European customers that are required to have the re-calibration done by a lab with ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation to ship their measurement tools to the US or Israel. They directly benefit from shorter lead times as they can just download the RMA-documents and send the material to our calibration and service center in Darmstadt without customs declaration.

Markus Schmiedt, Manager of our Calibration and Service Center in Darmstadt together with Thomas Zorn, Quality Supervisor in Darmstadt, coordinated all efforts to finally hold the accreditation in hand.

ISO/IEC 17025 Certificates: https://www.ophiropt.com/en/iso-accreditation-and-certificates