Review ISO 17025 audit readiness

Readiness summarises the evidence health of the organisation's audit topics. It helps users find missing, expired, incomplete, unreviewed, or not-assessed evidence before preparing a dossier. It does not determine conformity, assign a compliance score, or identify a nonconformity.

Prerequisites

• Select the organisation being assessed.
• Complete enough of the audit profile to describe the declared scope.
• Review applicability for the audit topics in scope.
• Upload and approve controlled PDF evidence where the organisation relies on supplied documents.
• Record relevant personnel technical authorisations.
• Have the required profile and evidence read permissions. Management actions require their corresponding profile or evidence management permission.

Review the evidence health summary

1. Open ISO 17025 audit.
2. Open Readiness.
3. Select Refresh when source evidence has recently changed.
4. Review the Evidence health summary counts.
5. Open each topic listed under Why attention is needed.
6. Note the assigned owner and target date where recorded.

The summary uses neutral states:

Ready means only that the configured evidence checks passed. It does not mean the evidence is adequate, the organisation conforms to ISO/IEC 17025, or an assessor will accept it.

Work through readiness reasons

For each topic that needs attention:

1. Read every displayed reason rather than relying only on the summary count.
2. Confirm whether the topic is genuinely applicable to the declared scope.
3. If applicability is undecided, leave it Not assessed until an authorised decision is made.
4. If it is Not applicable, enter a clear rationale based on the organisation's controlled scope decision.
5. If evidence is missing, upload and approve the correct controlled PDF revision.
6. If evidence is draft or unreviewed, complete its independent approval workflow.
7. If evidence is expired, superseded, past review, or otherwise non-current, create and approve the required replacement revision.
8. Link the approved evidence to the topic and state its Purpose.
9. Assign an owner and target date when follow-up work needs accountability.
10. Refresh readiness and review the remaining reasons.

The exact reason shown is the most useful guide. A topic can have more than one reason, and resolving one reason may leave another outstanding.

Review linked evidence

1. Open Linked evidence.
2. Confirm that each link points to the intended approved controlled revision.
3. Read the recorded purpose and verify that it explains the connection without copying sensitive document content.
4. Remove an obsolete link when authorised.
5. Link the correct approved revision from the topic's Link evidence action.

A link is a traceable reference, not an assessment decision. A file can be linked and still be incomplete, out of date, irrelevant, or insufficient for the organisation's obligations.

Review personnel evidence

1. Open Personnel authorisations.
2. Check that relevant people have current active authorisations for the scope being prepared.
3. Review limits, effective dates, expiry dates, authorisers, and supporting evidence.
4. Resolve expired, suspended, draft, or superseded authorisation gaps through the controlled authorisation workflow.

Do not substitute application roles for technical competence records.

Expected result

Each audit topic has a deliberate applicability state, rationale where required, and clear evidence-health reasons. Owners can see actionable preparation work, while the workspace preserves the distinction between evidence availability and a conformity assessment.

Warnings

• A gap means expected evidence is missing or cannot currently pass a configured evidence check. It is not automatically a nonconformity.
• Ready is not a certificate, accreditation decision, legal opinion, or assurance that supplied content is adequate.
• Marking a topic Not applicable to remove an attention state is inappropriate unless the organisation has made and documented that scope decision.
• Do not rely on the readiness summary without reviewing the underlying profile, controlled revisions, personnel authorisations, links, and reasons.
• Correct source records before creating a dossier; do not use a dossier to hide unresolved evidence states.

Permissions and separation of duties

Users may have read-only readiness access without permission to change the profile, applicability, evidence links, controlled documents, or authorisations. Evidence preparers cannot assume approval authority, and dossier preparers cannot approve their own dossier.

When a control is absent, check the selected organisation, source-record lifecycle, exact effective permission, record version, and independence requirements. Ask an owner or quality manager to assign the correct reviewer rather than sharing accounts or bypassing the workflow.

Next steps

• Set up the ISO 17025 audit profile
• Manage the controlled evidence library
• Record personnel technical authorisations
• Create an ISO 17025 dossier

Progress and recovery

Use the Dossiers section to prepare and generate an approved evidence package. Generation status updates automatically and a completion message appears when the download is ready. If storing the generated package fails, Retry generation queues the same approved frozen evidence snapshot, retaining its revision and approval. Missing or invalid evidence and other generation failures require review and a corrected revision; they cannot use this retry. Supporting choices have their own retry action.