CertifyingExcellence.BuildingTrust.

Cost is driven by audit days, which are calculated under IAF MD 5 from your effective headcount and the risk category of your activity — not set commercially. That means we cannot quote meaningfully without your headcount, scope and number of sites, and any body that quotes a flat price without asking for those is not calculating audit days properly. Our quotations show the calculation, cover the full three-year cycle including both surveillance audits, and state travel separately at cost.

For an organisation with a working system, typically eight to twelve weeks from application to certificate: two to three days for the quotation, about a week to contract and plan, Stage 1, a gap of two to four weeks, Stage 2, then nonconformity closure and the certification decision. If the system still has to be built, add three to six months of implementation before any of that starts.

Three years from the certification decision date, conditional on successful surveillance audits at approximately twelve and twenty-four months. It is not a three-year certificate you can put in a drawer; missing a surveillance audit puts it at risk of suspension.

It means the certification body itself has been assessed by a national accreditation body against ISO/IEC 17021-1, and that the accreditation body is a signatory to the IAF Multilateral Recognition Arrangement. That MLA signature is the mechanism by which a certificate issued in India is recognised elsewhere. A certificate without accreditation from an MLA signatory is a private document — it may look identical and many customers will not accept it.

Not to the same client. ISO/IEC 17021-1 prohibits a certification body from providing management system consultancy to an organisation it certifies, and we apply that rule strictly. We do offer advisory services — gap analysis, documentation and implementation support — but an organisation that receives them from us must be certified by a different body for the cooling-off period the accreditation rules define. We tell clients this in writing before any engagement begins.