Fortis Improves Efficiency Of American Association For Laboratory Accreditation's Accreditation Process

Reduces annual paper, duplication, and storage costs by $100,000

Non-profits face specific business operating challenges in order to safeguard their ongoing status and compliance. At the heart of the challenge is the need to maintain valid documentation on everything from bylaws to accounting practices. In addition, non-profits need to communicate with a variety of constituents – from members to volunteers, staff to general public. These challenges create an abundance of documents that must be disseminated, organized, and stored in a secure and efficient manner. To compound the challenge, non-profits must accomplish all this with limited resources – from constraining budgets to diminishing manpower. The result can be a document management bottleneck that impedes an organization’s ability to function on a daily level.

The American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) is a non-profit, non-governmental, public service, membership society that also provides comprehensive accreditation services for testing laboratories, calibration laboratories, inspection bodies, proficiency testing providers, medical testing laboratories, reference material producers, and product certification bodies. In addition to its in-house staff, A2LA has over 120 field assessors scattered across the U.S. and internationally who perform on-site visits and issue comprehensive reports on their findings as part of the accreditation process. Each step of the process has to be documented by both A2LA and the organizations seeking accreditation.

The challenge for A2LA is multiplied as it operates as a non-profit, membership-based organization that also offers a primary service – accreditation for organizations that have to meet strict national and international standards. All of which requires documentation – a lot of it.