Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to AASHTO Resource Q&A. We're taking time to discuss construction materials, testing and inspection with people in the know. From exploring testing problems and solutions to laboratory best practices and quality management, we're covering topics important to you.

Speaker 2: 0:19

Welcome to AASHTO Resource Q&A. I'm Brian Johnson.

Speaker 1: 0:22

And I'm Kim Swanson and we are here with Pete Unger. Brian, do you want to give him a little intro? I think you know him better than I do.

Speaker 2: 0:29

Yeah, so I met Pete years ago at an ASTM meeting and well, several ASTM meetings in Committee E36, which handles a lot of the quality management system requirements, particularly around ASTM E329 requirements, particularly around ASTM E329, and also has handled the adoption of ISO standards, and Pete's going to probably clarify that a little bit here. But Pete is currently with International Quality Excellence in Infrastructure Systems LLP, which I also want to ask you about. Pete, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 3: 1:06

Thank you very much, brian. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to talk about my history in the business of accreditation and where we emerged the quality management system, standards and requirements for accreditation of laboratories. I started actually in the business of accreditation In 1976, joining as assistant coordinator of the National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program, which was originally lodged in the Commerce Department but moved out to MBS, which is now NIST. And during that time the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Commerce was negotiating with different countries in Denmark about the cross-border acceptance of test data and they had started a conference in 1976, which turned out to be the International Laboratory Accreditation Conference, which then got turned into a cooperation ILAC. At that time, I think the second year, 1978, we hosted it in Washington DC and I was the gopher going back and forth, passing notes back and forth as we negotiated. What was the next that everybody agreed around the table was the best way to assure that you're competent Laboratories and laboratory data. You could get confidence in the data coming from accredited labs. So we approached ISO and that was rather than ASTM, and although we did make an attempt to offer ASTM as the place to do the standardization and because ASTM had already done work I mean E548 and your favorite standard has been around forever. In fact it's maybe probably one of the first ones.

Speaker 3: 3:36

Anyway, e548, some of the text was actually offered to develop Guide 25. And I got involved with actually sitting on the committees to write the damn thing. John Locke was my boss at the time at Nevlap allowed me to do all this travel to help go to Geneva to help write the original guide and the standards. And I've been involved ever since the original guide and the standards. And I've been involved ever since we also hosted NAVLAP and A2LA when I joined A2LA in 1985. We ended up helping to develop the peer evaluation process for recognition accreditation bodies for the purpose of identifying appropriate accreditations of laboratories that were offering test data on exported products. Basically, I've been involved from that ever, from the get-go, chairing the Mutual Recognition Committee of ILAC, working with the Asia Pacific, chairing that.

Speaker 3: 4:55

I actually, long ago I was chair of ASTME 36. And part of what I did at ASTME E36 was to encourage the adoption of the ISO standards, iso guides, as US standards and E36 was the committee to do that process to support an ANSI designation as a standard, us ANSI standard, an ANSI designation as a standard, US ANSI standard and I ultimately ended up chairing ILAC for three terms, about nine years. So I've been involved in the effort, forever Retired from A to LA 10 years ago. I've been consulting ever since, working with various accreditation bodies, laboratories, certification bodies to help them meet the ISIS standards and get qualified for accreditation. And in the case of accreditation bodies, I've of late been doing internal audits of accreditation bodies Mexican body, canadian body, a couple of US bodies. So that's what's keeping me busy. I've also done peer evaluations of accreditation bodies for the Inter-American Accreditation Cooperation and the Asia-PacAmerican Accreditation Cooperation and the Asia-Pacific Accreditation Cooperation.

Speaker 3: 6:29

I've been slowing down now since I've reached the ripe young age of 75. Cut back on my travel. I like to work a little bit more locally and remotely. Actually, I've done a few things remotely. My most recent on-site effort was last December in Saudi Arabia, no less. So I ended up training aspiring lead assessors for the Gulf Accreditation Cooperation, lead assessors for 17,025, the laboratory criteria document.

Speaker 2: 7:13

Was that an ASQ lead auditor certification, or was that? Just the auditor training that you conduct.

Speaker 3: 7:20

I don't do the 9001 certification stuff. No, in fact, accreditation bodies don't necessarily buy into that at all. That's usually relegated to lead auditors of the quality management system standards, not the accreditation competence standards competence standards, at least. Accreditation bodies have resisted actually having to require everybody to be certified. I stood strongly against that concept, even though when ISO 9001 first came out in 1985, I made an effort to become trained and certified as a 9001 lead utterer. I made an effort to become trained and certified as a 9001 lead auditor on the original standard. The standard 9001 has radically changed and I haven't really kept up with it. And I didn't keep up the certification because I was not doing ISA 9001 certification audits.

Speaker 3: 8:27

There is, I believe if you make an effort to be certified, you really have to demonstrate experience in actually applying 9001 or any of the other certification management system certification requirements.

Speaker 3: 8:44

Doing 70,025 assessments I don't know whether they're actually counting that although what is counted is 70,025 is treated as equivalent to 9,001. So laboratories who get accredited at 70,025 can say to their customers if the customer is saying you need to be 9001 certified, which we, you know, adamantly object to, those customers say that there is a statement from ISO that basically endorses the fact that if you're credited to 70,025, it's equivalent to ISO 9000 certification. Very important so labs don't have to go through the nonsense of getting certified in 9001 and can rely on their accreditation as the number one way to demonstrate that I'm competent to provide decent results to my customers. And I think that's held, and I believe internationally the demand for 9001 certification of laboratories is really diminishing, going away. Although I haven't been involved with laboratories accreditation for a long time, I think that's the case, brian. I believe that's the case for you. You see people that are. Some people are saying well, we need 9,001.

Speaker 2: 10:16

I have never had anybody ask me that question, one time.

Speaker 3: 10:20

Okay, well, that's okay.

Speaker 2: 10:21

I think you are correct.

Speaker 3: 10:24

It did happen in the early 90s, of course that's okay. I think you are correct. It did happen in the early 90s. Of course that's a long time ago.

Speaker 2: 10:29

Right, yeah, things were not fully resolved in that area at that point, I imagine. I want to go back to kind of the beginning of the story, when you were formulating all of these policies and being involved in the very beginning in the mid-70s the meeting you said the US and Denmark were working on this together. Was there a particular product or material, or was there a problem that was being solved at that point, a specific problem that Denmark and the US were trying to resolve, or was it a general issue?

Speaker 3: 11:09

I think it was clear that US exporters were very demanding of you know why do we have to test the product twice? We test the product for European standards in the United States and we send it to Europe and they test it again. It's a cost, an unnecessary cost. We need to facilitate acceptance of test data. And how do we do that? In the mid-'70s they said we'd do it through accreditation. That's one of the reasons why NABLAB got started. It was the first national system created in the United States. What NABLAB did not do, unfortunately, is develop a broad-based accreditation scheme for all types of laboratories, all types of laboratories. It started out with you know what do we start out with? Carpeting testing, thermal insulation, concrete and it just simply was too arduous. And our US lab community and some industry groups supported the creation of American Association for Laboratory Accreditation when we created A2LA. Obviously the point was to allow all kinds of laboratories to get accredited and get their data accepted overseas. That was the primary purpose initially of A2LA. Then it started to morph into the automotive industry decided well, you know, we need to have a system for assuring the competence of our supplier laboratory network. So General Motors really drove A2LA in the late 80s big time because they started requiring a tool accreditation of all their supplier network, which included not just the United States but overseas folks. So we had a need to cooperate internationally.

Speaker 3: 13:16

Early on, when we tried to get recognized in Europe, they came over and did a peer evaluation of us and said you know what? We can't accept you because you haven't authenticated the traceability, you don't accredit calibration laboratories. We as A2LA were not really widely accepted by the calibration community. When we go to the National Corporation for Standards Laboratories I guess NCSL they said government should be doing it. Okay, let's get NIST, get NavLab started. And that's finally happened. And a few years later we did get accepted under the fact that NIST, navlab started and we were also accrediting Cal Labs. So we were able to demonstrate authenticate traceability for Europe and we did have a couple of bilateral recognition. And then of course ILAC came along and said you know that's crazy, all these bilaterals, that's ridiculous. We need to have a multilateral agreement. Everybody's duplicating the evaluations of everybody else. Multilateral agreement, everybody's duplicating the evaluations of everybody else. In fact when I started, john Locke supported me to do these bilateral evaluations and so I got a lot of experience running around evaluating other accreditation bodies and it got me started in developing the peer evaluation process.

Speaker 3: 14:45

It's a fundamental role of ILAC and IF and the new GLOBAC. The primary purpose for having this cooperation is to recognize each other as providing acceptable accreditations, and Europe started the first cooperation and then we had the Asia Pacific starting the second one and we had a bilateral and then the region started to develop the Inter-American Accreditation Cooperation, which I supported. We also supported ANACLA and North American, which actually wasn't workable because there weren't enough countries involved. It wasn't workable because there weren't enough countries involved and so I supported the Inter-American Accreditation Cooperation. Atla had the first bilateral agreement in APLAC Asia Pacific Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation, which they merged and integrated the accreditation bodies that are doing certification accreditation bodies that are doing certification accreditation, and so now we're having ILAC and IAF merging and it's going to be GLOBAC Okay so IAF New Zealand, ilac Netherlands, they're forming GLOBAC, they're forming glow back we did last March, actually, no, 15 months ago the World Trade Organization's Technical Barriers Trade Committee actually published, finally, guidance on conformity assessment policy and procedures and requirements that governments may place.

Speaker 3: 16:28

They recognized the ILAC and IFMOA. That was something as ILAC chair I spent. I went to three different TBT committee meetings promoting that concept. The World Trade TBT Agreement actually recognizes accreditation as a mechanism to facilitate trade. But what they didn't do until this guidance was to say what is an acceptable accreditation. So they have put in this WTO guidance onformity Assessment Policy and Procedures, use the ILAC and IF MLAs as a means for recognizing competent accreditation.

Speaker 3: 17:32

That to me actually was my number one international achievement because I pushed that big time and pushed it with the US government, which has adopted it for quite a while. We do have some US government agencies that are recognizing the ILOC MRA, epa, fda, cpsc and US Coast Guard and let's see the General Services Administration, I believe, has used it. Anyway, all of that stuff we lobbied long ago to get that done in the US. When we go to other countries, very little effort is made by these countries to get the MLA accepted, countries to get the MLA accepted. Ea's peer evaluation process neglects it big time, and I was involved in evaluating EA a long time ago. In fact, the first step they could care less about promoting the international agreements.

Speaker 2: 18:30

They promote the European agreements. So, Pete, you mentioned MRA and MLA.

Speaker 3: 18:34

What are those?

Speaker 2: 18:35

That's mutual recognition agreement. What's MLA?

Speaker 3: 18:39

Yeah, I'm sorry, multilateral agreement. The IAF decided to use the acronym or multilateral agreement. To use the acronym or multilateral agreement partly because MRA has been used by governments mutual recognition arrangements used by governments ILAC in its early years, in effect, apac insisted that MRA was not necessarily a government-to-government, it was accreditation by accreditation we're recognizing each other and we promote the acceptance of equivalence of their accreditation. That still has persisted in ILAC. Now what Globex does? I suspect they might resort to just promoting MLA instead of MRA. One of the reasons.

Speaker 3: 19:41

The other reason why IAF was not liking the MRA process, because I think and this is some speculation but product certification bodies who have their own requirements for the product, such as UL, can't not really recognize another product certification body. That's not using the UL standard as equivalent. So in other words, unlike laboratory accreditation where if you're running the exact same test, you can recognize each other's test results, if it's an ASTM test, yeah okay. An ISA test and they're accredited for it, yeah okay, the result that comes out, you can accept it as equivalent. But a product certification based on different standard or different specification for the product doesn't.

Speaker 3: 20:50

There is no mutual recognition. So they say mutual multilateral arrangement, mla rather than MRA. I think that's the genesis of why they adopted MLA. Iaf the International Accreditation Form deal with accreditation of certification bodies and their first effort was the ISA 9000 certifications when they integrated product certification no-transcript, so because of the different product standards. Anyway, I think that's the reason why MRA is not used by IF and I suspect Glowback, when they actually get everything merged and ILF and ILAC actually go away, they probably will adopt MLA as a less and it's different than the government MRAs.

Speaker 2: 22:08

So you mentioned the TBT. I remember years ago looking at the TBT and not seeing really anything as a minimum expectation. Just correct me if I'm wrong. Did it before it had the ILAC MRA in it? It was based on whatever the minimum expectation was from the two parties involved in trade.

Speaker 3: 22:43

Actually the TBT agreement, among other things, really encourages the minimum in terms of conformity assessment requirements. Ideally, it's a rely on manufacturers' declaration of conformity, Self-declaration of conformity that's the least onerous requirement.

Speaker 3: 23:02

My limited experience in hearing from countries that decide they need third-party certification, or some more stringent technical barrier, if you will. When the marketplace starts complaining about these unacceptable products, they force the governments into writing requirements for certification, accreditation, retesting inspection. In particular, those regulatory bodies have conformity assessment requirements, which could be considered technical barriers. They're justified barriers because if they're consumer products food particularly, geez you don't want to have products that will poison and kill people.

Speaker 2: 23:58

And in our industry, construction materials, cement is a big issue, right? You don't know what you're getting in the port. You know testing has to be conducted before it goes into use, because you don't know if you're getting cement or some other product in these bags, or or loosely, uh, cast in the hull of a ship or whatever. Whatever, however, it's transported over here. So there is a need for some oversight and testing once it makes a big journey. You know especially and I can, I can kind of understand that about Europe how they would like to. You know they feel comfortable within the confines of their continent with what's going on, but maybe are not so about something making a longer journey or coming from a place where they have less stringent rules.

Speaker 3: 24:46

You remind me I am helping out the Canadian Lumber Standards Accreditation Board, CLSAB. They accredit a dozen certification bodies that rate, determine the quality of lumber. They export a whole bunch of lumber to the United States and overseas to Australia, Japan, countries that are tree deficient. They have been not forced but encouraged to get their accreditation internationally recognized so that the accreditation of the certification bodies and their data and the stuff that goes along with the labels on the lumber can be automatically accepted in Japan and Taiwan and Australia and, for that matter, the United States. They can have some confidence that the Canadian Lumber Standards Accreditation Board, accreditation of the certification bodies that do this, we can have confidence and acceptance and we don't have to re-inspect the whole load of lumber that comes in Very expensive process to do it on import and that clearly there's a number of other products like that. I think and you point out, cement Perfect, there's a, there's, I'm sure there's other products that we import where we want to have confidence that the testing and these certification has been done properly.

Speaker 2: 26:23

For your work with the lumber industry. What is the effort to build that confidence with the importer, the importing country? You know what's the main objective. You know you're brought into work. How do you make? Is it a relationship thing? Is it more inspections? Is it what happens?

Speaker 3: 26:43

I think there's confidence building that's done among the. Certainly the Canadian Lumber Standards Accreditation Board does a lot of international negotiations and work. They share the standards, they share what's going on. They've just recently been peer evaluated by the Inter-American Accreditation Cooperation and they were hoping in August they will be a signatory to the IEF agreement for accreditation of product certifiers. Very narrow, of course they're only dealing with people that certify lumber. They've gone through the process. They've trained their folks. They've gone through the process. They've trained their folks, they've trained their certification bodies. And then, of course, the certification bodies are going to be checked out by the accreditation body to see whether or not you did understand 70,065 and how you're supposed to go about doing the certification of lumber.

Speaker 3: 27:42

There's need for cooperation, whether or not it's from accreditation or face-to-face the regulators of um. You know that the building code authorities talk to each other. I I'm pretty sure that it was icc in the united states, international code council negotiates with the Canadian counterparts about how should we? You know what are the specifications and requirements for certain types of lumber that are usable for building or whatever plywood building or whatever plywood. They can do this without accreditation for the united states because there's a lot of confidence between the united states and canada on the guard. But when you're shipping these lumber across the pacific to japan in particular, japan was pretty demanding, I guess, is what the word is as well as Australia.

Speaker 3: 28:54

You know your accreditation. You know, do you meet this international standard for accreditation? Well, he can't say that he does until he gets this peer evaluation. The decision should be made in August in the Dominican Republic and then they would be automatically accepted by IAF, because the IAC's peer evaluation process is accepted at IAF. Anyway, that's where we're at with, where accreditation has a role. Some countries use it, many countries don't, but I think it's growing, particularly in Asia. It's growing. It's growing particularly in Asia. It's growing. There's a lot more recognition of accreditation as an integral part of quality infrastructure.

Speaker 2: 29:52

We've talked about the impact accreditation has on the larger you know macro level. Let's turn it the other way for a second and let's talk about the impact accreditation has on individual laboratories and quality of testing. You know you've been involved with accreditation for a long time, so how do you see the impact that accreditation has on the quality of the testing laboratory itself?

Speaker 3: 30:21

Well, I have to be biased about this, Of course, as am I they're doing. If they are assessed and there's found to be deficiencies in the processing requirements or the actual following the test methods gosh damn then accreditation helps the lab to make sure they are not cutting corners. I've seen results in concrete testing labs early, early on, where assessors would find that labs would be faking. They take the three cylinders and only test one and then make up the numbers for the other two and don't actually break the other two, and of course that's very serious. If they do that, their accreditation is really suspect. So I think accreditation definitely encourages people to do the right thing and being very serious about whatever is required in the process of the test follow the test, Don't cut corners, Don't try to get the job over quickly. That is unacceptable and causes possible erroneous results that get reported to the client and then things happen in a very bad way possibly.

Speaker 2: 31:59

You know we were in a low bid environment. You know we were in a low bid environment and if people are not careful about who they award these contracts to, you're going to have more problems. But yeah, I agree with what you said An unaccredited laboratory can be as good as an accredited laboratory, but you don't know. You don't know. There's no accountability, there's no.

Speaker 3: 32:35

Third, party objective evaluation. So so, while it, is possible.

Speaker 2: 32:36

We have not. We haven't found a whole lot of laboratories come into our program that are not accredited.

Speaker 3: 32:40

That find it to be an easy process. Yeah, that gives me some confidence that the accreditation process has some value. Yeah, and when they sit down and say, well, document, what's our policy, what are our objectives, what? What are the processes we need to follow to make sure we're providing consistently good data? How do we treat our people? You know it does. It provides some discipline, right, and and we haven't had any recent disasters in this area, frankly, and so things are being done professionally better, clearly.

Speaker 3: 33:15

So I'm very happy to say accreditation is very valuable for the labs themselves and their customers. I mean, ultimately, the customers have to make decisions based on test data and if the test data is wrong, it can cause possibly mistakes, including deaths, and that's particularly why accreditation is valuable for the life and death tests and certifications. So, anyway, that's my opinion and I think the laboratories who get accredited feel more comfortable, feel more comfortable. They get very proud that they've accomplished something that may not be as easy as some people suggest. It's not necessarily easy getting accredited and certain kind of testing is maybe more difficult than others. I know most, actually, because of the development of concrete and thermal insulation. Construction materials testing is probably I'm most familiar with, but also environmental testing, food testing, calibration or other areas where I've gone out and at least witnessed assessments.

Speaker 2: 35:11

Accreditation covers all kinds of different topics, right.

Speaker 3: 35:15

Your accreditation is particularly important to make sure that building products, the buildings themselves, roadwork bridges are actually not going to fail with people in them or people on them, and that's a huge, huge deal, Huge deal. So I greatly respect the AASHTO effort to accredit all the laboratories that are in this business, whether it's in the United States or maybe they have some clients internationally.

Speaker 2: 35:54

Right, I appreciate that and we do. It's funny because you know you have some people who are really skeptical or jaded and say, oh, you're just trying to make more money or have more customers. It's like that is never the objective. I mean we want more oversight, we want more assurance that what is being paved or being put into a structure is what it is supposed to be and to protect the public interest. And that's about it supposed to be and to protect the public interest, and that's about it. I mean, if it's 2,000 labs, if it's 1,000 labs, if it's 500 labs, whatever it is, we just want to make sure it's done properly and I think we've made some improvements. And it is hard telling, especially some of the things that you mentioned the cases of fraud, misrepresentation of information, taking shortcuts that stuff can be really hard to determine in a short visit. But we certainly do try to identify those things when we can and take action.

Speaker 2: 36:55

And I think that's hard for all accrediting bodies to be able to take action that they need to take, especially in a competitive environment where they could go to a lower quality alternative, if there isn't some kind of you know back to your ILAC recognition, if there isn't some kind of assurance of consistency, it can be really difficult for people.

Speaker 3: 37:16

Leveling the playing field.

Speaker 2: 37:18

Right.

Speaker 3: 37:19

So that competition among laboratories is fair and that everybody has to live up to the same standard. To me is the justification for what you guys are doing and why accreditation is valuable levels the playing field absolutely well, pete.

Speaker 2: 37:37

Thank you so much for your time. One last thing I'd like you to to give you an opportunity to just tell people how to reach out to you if they are interested in hiring you as a consultant.

Speaker 3: 37:49

You can search the website iqeiscom I-Q-E-I-S dot com.

Speaker 2: 37:57

So we'll have a link to your website for sure, and email so people can reach out to you. Thank you for your time today, pete. I know you've got a today, pete. I know you've got a lot going on, so I appreciate the history lesson. This was really fascinating for me as an accrediting body director. To hear the background of how all these things developed was really interesting. So thanks for sharing your time and expertise with us today.

Speaker 3: 38:25

Thanks, Brian, Thanks.

Speaker 1: 38:26

Kim, thanks for listening to AASHTO Resource Q&A. If you'd like to be a guest or just submit a question, send us an email at podcast at AASHTOresourceorg, or call Brian at 240-436-4820. For other news and related content, check out AASHTO Resources' social media accounts or go to ashtoresourceorg.