Assurance Systems Management Services

This supports quality and consistency by providing certification body evaluations, auditing and evaluation tools, guidance documents, a single registry for all certified organizations, case studies, and data collection and management of key metrics for research publications.

Assurance systems management services include:

• Development: Designing compliance systems, monitoring platforms and conformity evaluation procedures
• Management: Ongoing management of programs to support scaling, continuous improvement and oversight of certification bodies
• Tools/research: Impact measurement platform to measure and drive progress

NSF offers custom program development, as well as our first project, the NSF/ANSI 391.1 assurance program for sustainable assessment for professional services.

NSF has published the first American National Standard for sustainability in the professional services industry, NSF/ANSI 391.1: General Sustainability Assessment Criteria for Professional Services. The new standard establishes criteria for evaluating the environmental, social, economic and supply chain impacts of professional services providers, including organizations classified as professional services providers by the U.S. Federal Professional Services Schedule (PSS) or NAICS code 54.

NSF will serve as the oversight body for the 391.1 assurance program, supporting the creation of documentation, systems and processes to aid the successful launch and implementation of the 391.1 scheme during the pilot phase and beyond.

We are currently in the process of implementing a pilot for the program, which will include approved certification bodies (CBs) and professional service organizations. Our goal is to launch pilot audits by summer 2020 with the intention of collecting the feedback and findings in the fall of 2020. We anticipate official program launch will occur in spring 2021.

We are now accepting applications for certification bodies.

NSF’s assurance systems management means that associations that want to implement an evaluation scheme for their members, but don’t have the resources to support these initiatives, can rely on us for standards development, training of stakeholders, tool development, oversight of implementation, evaluation of certification bodies, and data collection and reporting.

Assurance systems management addresses many of the issues in standards and scheme implementation:

• Inconsistent assessment and application of standard requirements
• Difficulty understanding the overall impact a standard has
• Lack of a single directory to collect information on certification across a single product category
• Challenges communicating issues in the field that would feed the revision process of a standard
• Ability to connect to the program drivers

Accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), NSF has developed over 80 currently active voluntary American National Standards under the scope of public health, safety, environment and sustainability assessment.

NSF has worked with numerous industry groups on implementing assurance program management within their industry, including the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB), which looked to NSF to further its mission to advance sustainability in the Canadian beef industry. As a strategic and tactical advisor, NSF supported the CRSB in developing the Certified Sustainable Beef Framework with the mission of driving the advancement and recognition of beef sustainability in Canada through a world-class, operation-level certification program using qualified trained auditors.