By Terri Ballerum

Accreditation is independent recognition that an organization meets the requirements of governing industry standards. Exemplar Global has been accredited by JAS-ANZ against ISO/IEC 17024: Conformity assessment – General requirements for bodies operating certification of persons for 15 years. Accreditation provides reassurance to our customers around best practice, quality, well-performing systems/processes, and continuous improvement. However, accreditation applies only to a defined scope of operation. Ours is no exception. In our case, accreditation has only applied to a small scope of individual certifications.

In the past six months, Exemplar Global has undertaken considerable work to improve and extend our certification products and complementary services to offer our customers even more value. This work requires a major restructure of our systems and procedures. As we rapidly build new, innovative products for our customers, we wish to extend our accreditation to cover a much broader range of our activities and increase its value.

We are currently updating our systems and procedures to reflect these new products and services and so we have requested a temporary suspension of our JAS-ANZ accreditation until the improvement efforts and realignment to the Exemplar Global management system are complete. The decision to suspend our JAS-ANZ accreditation was entirely voluntary and has been granted for a maximum period of six months only. Auditors who are directly affected by this temporary change, along with relevant stakeholders, have been notified personally by email. We are aware that one competitor has been approaching our customers. Unfortunately, this organization is misinformed and is presenting inaccurate information. Interestingly, they hold no accreditation of any sort for any of their programmes.

We look forward to reinstating our JAS-ANZ accreditation. Exemplar Global continues to avidly support JAS-ANZ and the value of accreditation generally. We are excited about extending our scope to cover more activities and include more of our community and look forward to sharing them with you.

About the author

With 11 years’ experience, Terri Ballerum brings strong technical knowledge and analytical skills to her role as Exemplar Global’s certification product manager.

Ballerum specialises in validating and simplifying management system and industry certification products and processes in the global certification field. She enjoys working with interested stakeholders to raise industry standards and work towards achieving international standardization.