The 14th Meeting of the EURAMET Technical Quality Committee was held
In Ljubljana in the period of April 17-18, 2019 the 14th Meeting of the EURAMET Technical Quality Committee was held.

In Ljubljana, Republic of Slovenia, in the period of April 17-18, 2019 the 14th Meeting of the EURAMET Technical Quality Committee was held. The Meeting was organized by MIRS, Institute of Metrology of the Republic of Slovenia.

TC-Q currently has 36 contact points (Malta alone has no representative) and 11 members of the management board. At this Meeting, 12 people were also involved in the work of the steering committee, which will make it easier to review the annual reports and written presentations of the NMI/DI.

Work from the last year's meeting was presented. The representative of the EURAMET Secretariat also commented on the work of the Secretariat in 2018. The Croatian Bureau of Metrology presented its new organization structure, as a new organization at EURAMET, because earlier the metrology of Croatia consisted of two organizations (DZM for legal metrology and HMI for scientific metrology), and now everything is under the umbrella of one DZM institution.

Lithuania also presented changes in its organization structure.

At this Meeting, for the first time, their quality management system was presented by the National Metrology Institute of Moldova, representatives of the proclaimed institutes (DIs) from Bosnia and Herzegovina (LABSAGAS) and Croatia (DZM-SOUL).

LABSAGAS is one of two designated institutes in Bosnia and Herzegovina recognized and reported by the Institute of Metrology of Bosnia and Herzegovina in BIPM (2016) as part of the decentralized metrology system of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Technical Committee on Quality unanimously expressed confidence in the LABSAGAS Quality Management System.

The Albanian Metrology Institute also had an initial (instead of a re-presentation) presentation, following the CMC suspension they published in 2014.

This was followed by re-presentations (which take place every 5 years) of national metrology institutes and their designated institutes from: Turkey, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Belgium, Ireland, Slovenia, Italy and Poland.

The largest number of presentations was held by representatives of the Republic of Slovenia who presented the QMS of their National Metrology Institute and 9 DIs.

The progress of peer review projects, i.e. which participating institutes undertook the evaluation and in what areas was reported. It was suggested how these projects should be carried out, as well as acceptable cases of launching these projects.

The adoption of the new TC-Q documents will be divided into two phases. In the first phase by September 2019, the guidelines for the initial presentation of the QMS will be revised and submitted for adoption by the BoD (EURAMET Board of Directors), while the re-evaluation guideline will be prepared for adoption next year.

Also, the non-compliances in the annual reports of all NMIs/DIs were discussed, as well as a proposal to hold a webinar on this topic in September 2019, due to minor non-recurrences.

One of the additional topics at the Meeting was related to the recurring theme from 2017, which refers to whether peer review should be mandatory for defined periods and for all areas.

The next meeting will be held in April 2020 in Bern, Switzerland.