THE EPT METHOD

Those who need statistics rarely turn to statistics: it looks complicated, distant, made for specialists.

The EPT platform was built to remove that barrier. You bring a technical question – a standard to validate, a legal limit under discussion, laboratories that disagree – and the platform gives it a statistical shape, a tailor-made protocol, and an answer you can defend.

This page explains how the method works, the expertise behind it, and why its results hold up where decisions are made.

Four principles, one method

1 · The problem comes first. Every study starts from the question, never from the standard. The standards – ISO/IEC 17043 for the process, ISO 13528 for the statistics – enter as a guarantee of rigour, not as a starting point.

2 · Collaborative by design. Evaluative proficiency testing schemes score laboratories against a stable, repetitive protocol. They are essential – and they answer one question only. EPT studies are collaborative: the statistical protocol is redesigned, every time, around the scientific question itself. It is the space that ISO/IEC 17043 explicitly leaves outside evaluative schemes – and it is where questions about standards, methods and limits actually live.

3 · Anonymity by design. Participation is protected not by promises but by architecture: identity and results are never linked. This is what allows public laboratories, control authorities and institutions to contribute with complete scientific freedom.

4 · The organiser owns the project. Whoever opens a project on the platform owns its project page: they organise it as they wish and develop its content as the study advances – presentation, protocol, data collection, results. The platform provides the method; the project remains theirs.

Why the dossier holds up where decisions are made

In Europe, accreditation is not a private label: under Regulation (EC) No 765/2008 it is the legally recognised attestation of laboratory competence.

When accredited laboratories take part in a collaborative study, their results carry that weight – and a protocol under ISO 13528 turns them into something no single laboratory can produce alone: the real measurement uncertainty of a method, measured across dozens of laboratories, not estimated on paper.

This is why an EPT dossier – complete with statistical treatment and interpretation – can be put on the table in standardisation committees, in regulatory reviews and in technical disputes. Not as an opinion: as evidence.

The expertise behind the platform

The EPT platform is run by people who have spent their professional lives where statistics meets the laboratory bench:

• Industrial statistics, applied for over twenty years – design of interlaboratory studies, measurement uncertainty, validation protocols under ISO 13528, ISO 5725 and the international framework of industrial statistics.
• Laboratory practice and management – direction of testing laboratories, materials science and food-contact specialisation: the protocols are written by people who know what a laboratory can actually do.
• Standardisation work – active membership in national standardisation working groups, including the role of technical reference in the development of UNI 11698:2017, the Italian standard on the uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessment results; advanced training for the Italian LCA Network.
• Management consulting – certified management consultancy (ICMCI framework), bridging the statistical protocol and the strategic question it must answer.

The standards we work with

ISO/IEC 17043 – conformity assessment and the organisation of interlaboratory comparisons.

ISO 13528 – the statistical methods for proficiency testing and interlaboratory studies.

ISO 5725 – accuracy, trueness and precision of measurement methods.

ISO Guide 35 and the GUM framework – reference materials and the expression of measurement uncertainty.

UNI 11698 – the uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessment results.

Sector frameworks where the study requires them – from IATF 16949 measurement-system analysis to the JRC framework for method validation studies.

The method is ready. The question is yours.

Open a project on the platform, or book a consultation to discuss what a collaborative study can do for your question.