Procedure 04 — Competence, Training and Awareness is fully developed with four appendices: Training Program, Training Record, Record of Attendance, and Competence Approval and Authorization Record. It covers the full competence lifecycle from recruitment through ongoing monitoring.
Procedure 05 — Addressing Risks and Opportunities is complete with a risk and opportunity registry appendix. It walks through identification, assessment, treatment, and the connection between risk management and the rest of the QMS.
Procedure 06 — Externally Provided Products and Services is new in this release. It covers supplier evaluation and approval, incoming verification, periodic re-evaluation, and subcontracting controls — all scoped to a battery materials characterization laboratory. Two appendices provide the Supplier Evaluation Record and the Approved Supplier List.
Every procedure in a QMS tells you what to do. But without understanding why a section exists, the procedure becomes a compliance exercise rather than a working tool.
We've added Insight blocks at the end of each procedure — visually distinct commentary sections that explain the reasoning behind the requirements. They cover the failure modes the section is designed to prevent, the connections to other sections, and the common mistakes laboratories make in implementation.
These are not part of the controlled procedure text. They are the conversation a mentor would have with you after you've read the procedure — the context that makes the difference between implementing a rule and understanding a system.
A small but important change: the introduction page now includes an explicit link to Understanding the System — the conceptual guide that explains how ISO 17025 thinks and how the procedures connect. If you're new to the project, start there.
We continue working through the People and Resources group: Procedure 07 (Facilities and Environmental Conditions), Procedure 08 (Equipment Maintenance, Calibration and Verification), and Procedure 09 (Customer Service). After that, we move into the Analytical Process group.
]]>AI is faster, more detailed, and more consistent than writing everything by hand. A single procedure in a Quality Management System can take days to draft from scratch. With AI, the first draft takes minutes — leaving more time for what actually matters: reviewing, correcting, and refining the content until it's right.
We don't use AI to replace expertise. We use it to express expertise faster.
Our development process looks like this:
This is not "AI-generated content" in the way people usually mean. It's human-directed, AI-assisted development — the same way a programmer uses a compiler or an engineer uses CAD software. The tool amplifies the work; it doesn't replace the thinking.
We could have said nothing. Most projects that use AI don't disclose it. But we think transparency is a strength, not a vulnerability — especially for a project about quality management, where integrity and traceability are foundational principles.
If you're evaluating this QMS for your laboratory, you deserve to know how it was made. And if you find an error — whether introduced by AI or by us — the entire project is open for you to flag it, fix it, or improve it.
ISO/IEC 17025 QMS documents are expensive to develop. Consultants charge thousands. Small laboratories and those in developing countries are often priced out entirely.
If AI can help produce high-quality, openly licensed QMS documentation that any laboratory can adopt and adapt — the net benefit far outweighs anyone's discomfort with the method. Access to quality should not depend on budget.
We'd rather develop, correct, and improve in the open than wait for a perfect process that never ships.
]]>Every laboratory that pursues accreditation to ISO/IEC 17025 faces the same challenge: the standard defines what you need, but not how to document it. Most labs either hire expensive consultants or adapt internal documents that are never shared with anyone else.
This means thousands of laboratories around the world are solving the same problems independently — writing the same procedures, the same policies, the same forms — from scratch.
OpenQMS 17025 is a fully open Quality Management System, developed incrementally and transparently. We will work through each clause of the standard and produce:
All content is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 — you can use it, adapt it, and redistribute it freely for non-commercial purposes.
OpenQMS is built in the open on GitHub. If you have experience with ISO 17025, laboratory accreditation, or quality management, we welcome your contributions:
Let's build this together.
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