Flexible Scope allows us to add tests under accreditation much faster by self-approval!

Thanks to the dedication and professionalism of all our lab workers and lab assistants, our testing laboratories were successfully subjected to the annual external BELAC audits!

We also succeeded in obtaining the extension of the 056-TEST scope to include a section of measurement techniques under 'flexible scope'. This allows us to perform certain new tests or standards under accreditation by self-approval.

What is a flexible scope?

An accreditation is the formal declaration of the technical competence and integrity of an institution for testing a particular product(group), coupled with the associated product and testing standards.
In Belgium, BELAC manages and monitors these accreditations.

An accreditation comes with a 'fixed' accreditation scope. This document lists all tests carried out by CENTEXBEL under BELAC EN ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation, according to the regulations and normative documents listed therein. Extensions of products or tests, changes to normative documents, etc. always require the intervention of BELAC, which sometimes causes the accreditation to lag behind.

To allow accredited institutions to respond quickly to customer requests and to new developments in the market and to respond smoothly to urgent situations, flexible scope accreditation exists.

A flexible scope consists of well-defined groups of tests instead of individual tests. The advantage of the flexible scope is that it allows us to add products or tests ourselves, obviously within the defined groups of tests, without BELAC's prior approval.

Centexbel received approval from BELAC to work with a flexible scope in March 2024. There are strict conditions attached to the use of this flexible scope, which are checked in detail during a BELAC audit.