Stage 2: Review and audit
What's involved
- The auditor will conduct an initial review to ensure your product or service appears to conform to the relevant GECA Standard. This will result in completion of a Preliminary Conformance Assessment (PCA).
- If the PCA is successful it means that the auditor believes that the product or service is likely to conform to the relevant standard.
- If the PCA is unsuccessful, it means that there is doubt that the product or service will conform to the relevant standard. At this point the auditor will discuss options with you; such as reformulating the product to comply with the standard, and continue with the audit, or to end the audit here.
- Following a successful PCA, the auditor will provide a proposal for the full audit process, or Conformance Assessment (CA). To complete the CA, the auditor will need to review product documentation and conduct site visits to verify compliance to all criteria within the GECA standard.
- The proposal will outline the fee for the CA process. This fee is set by, and payable to the auditor.
- A Verification Report (VR) is produced as a result of the CA.
- As part of the VR, the auditor will issue a Letter of Conformance (LOC) to GECA, stating whether or not your product or service conforms to the standard.
- If your product does conform to the standard criteria the auditor will discuss options with you, and continue with the audit.
- All information about your product remains confidential information between the applicant and the CAB. GECA will only ever receive a LOC which states that the product/s conformed.
Timeline
1-3 months variable (Assuming all data and documentation has been provided to the auditor as needed.)
Costs
Payable to the auditor, variable depending on the type and number of products, and site visit costs. (This is the cost of the audit of your product or service against a GECA standard).
- Audit fees are negotiated directly with the auditor - currently NCS International (Please note that GECA are not informed of the audit costs and have no involvement with setting this fee)
- Audit fees apply to new applicants and existing GECA Licensees, for either certification audits, surveillance audits or recertification audits.
- If your organisation has other auditing needs (ISO 14001 or ISO 9001), you can bundle these audits together with your GECA certification to reduce your costs and streamline the audit process