NDT Equipment and Calibration Management in Canada

NDT equipment by serial number: issue and return, reservations, calibration and maintenance history. Request a demo. Affordable. Accessible. Fully customizable. Quote on request.

Equipment control for Canadian NDT companies

Canadian inspection companies manage equipment across distances and conditions that break most spreadsheets. A crew mobilises from Edmonton to an oil sands site north of Fort McMurray for a long rotation. Another works an upgrader turnaround in Alberta's Industrial Heartland. A third is on a pipeline integrity dig in northern British Columbia, and a fourth supports an outage at an Ontario nuclear station. Meanwhile the shop in Sarnia or Calgary is inspecting pressure vessels for a fabricator. Equipment moves between all of them, often by air, road and camp shuttle, and each move is a chance for a serial to go missing from the record.

The Asset Management app in Atlantis NDT ERP is a register for your NDT equipment: flaw detectors, phased array and TOFD units, eddy current instruments, probes, wedges, scanners, yokes, UV lamps, light meters, calibration blocks, exposure devices and survey meters. Each is tracked by serial with its holder, condition, lifecycle, calibration and maintenance history.

To be clear about scope: this is not plant integrity software. It does not hold your client's pressure equipment, pipeline segments or their inspection history. It manages the tools your company owns or rents, so you know what you have, where it is, who has it and whether it is fit to use. It is part of Atlantis NDT ERP, a pre-configured and customised Atlantis ERP system set up for you by Atlantis NDT.

What the app tracks

Every serialised item has an equipment type, serial number, asset tag, firmware version, accessories list, assigned person, condition and lifecycle stage: new, active, in calibration, in repair, rented out, retired or disposed. Calibration frequency and status are on the same record, and rental rates can be recorded for kit you hire out.

Calibration labs, accreditation and cross-border service

In Canada, calibration laboratories are typically accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 by the Standards Council of Canada, and a good share of NDT instruments also go south of the border to manufacturer service centres or to labs accredited by A2LA. Either way, the questions from auditors are the same: who calibrated this serial, under which accreditation, with what result, and when is it next due?

Each calibration record captures the provider, certificate number, standard, range, uncertainty stated on the certificate, the accredited-lab flag, the result and the next due date. The certificate register stores the lab accreditation number and the PDF, and its status moves between valid, expiring and expired so nobody has to calculate dates. In Purchase, calibration labs are typed vendors with accreditation number and accreditation expiry, and purchase order lines can be tied to the exact serial being sent.

Cross-border shipping is where equipment gets lost in time rather than space. A phased array unit sent to a US service centre can be away for weeks once shipping and customs are counted. Outbound and inbound movement records, together with the in-calibration or in-repair lifecycle stage, show exactly which units are away and since when. Reservations stop a planner committing a unit that is still in a courier depot.

Radiography under the CNSC

Industrial radiography in Canada is licensed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission under the Nuclear Substances and Radiation Devices Regulations, exposure devices are operated by CNSC-certified exposure device operators, and transport of sources falls under the Packaging and Transport of Nuclear Substances Regulations alongside Transport Canada's dangerous goods rules. Licensees are expected to keep radiation survey meters calibrated, to keep exposure devices maintained and to know where every device is.

The Asset Management app covers the equipment side of that obligation. Exposure devices, source containers, survey meters, personal alarming dosimeters, collimators and guide tubes each have a serial record. Survey meter calibrations are recorded with certificate, result and due date, and alerts go out before they lapse. Device servicing and inspections go into the maintenance log. Issuing a camera or a survey meter can require supervisor and manager approval, and every movement between base, site and service provider is logged.

Vehicles that carry sources are held in Fleet, which records whether a vehicle can carry radioactive sources, its transport licence number and expiry, and its assignment to a project and driver.

What the app does not do out of the box is keep your CNSC licence-format records, source inventories or leak test logs, or calculate source activity. If you want those in the ERP, they are scoped with your radiation safety officer during implementation. Operator certifications themselves are recorded in the ERP's Certificates app alongside technicians' other qualifications.

Cold weather, camps and long rotations

Winter work in Alberta and the north is hard on equipment. Batteries lose charge quickly, screens slow down, cables stiffen and crack, and condensation forms when a cold instrument comes into a warm trailer. Coupling is its own challenge, with low-temperature couplants and penetrant systems that need to suit the conditions.

Condition recorded at issue and return means cold-weather damage is noticed and attributed properly rather than discovered at the next job. Maintenance log entries for cleaning and drying, cable replacement, battery replacement or repairs build a history per serial, so you can see which units stand up to winter work and which do not.

Camp-based rotations change how kit moves. A technician on a long rotation keeps equipment for weeks, then hands over to a back-to-back partner. Issue and return records that handover properly instead of leaving it to a note in the trailer. The dashboard KPI for issued equipment overdue flags kit that stayed on site after the rotation ended, and reservations make sure the next rotation's equipment is actually available on the date the charter leaves.

Consumables for remote sites are worth planning, not guessing. Reorder levels and low-stock flags on couplant, cleaners, penetrant, developer, MT consumables and PPE, with a movement ledger per job, help the store send enough on the first shipment.

Nuclear outages and pressure equipment work

Ontario's nuclear stations run outage inspection campaigns under CSA N285.4 periodic inspection requirements, where equipment and technique qualification are taken seriously and client auditors expect tight control of which instrument, probe and firmware version were used. Recording firmware on each serial and logging firmware updates in the maintenance history answers the question which version was used on the day. Accessories lists make sure a qualified probe and cable set stays together. If a client requires a specific equipment list per work package, that report is configured during implementation.

Pressure equipment work in Alberta sits under ABSA oversight, and many shops operate quality control programmes that reference equipment calibration. ABSA and owner-user audits, and fabricators working to CSA and ASME codes, expect you to show that the UT set, the yoke or the densitometer used for an examination was in calibration. Opening the serial record and showing the certificate PDF is quicker than searching a shared drive.

Structural steel shops inspecting to CSA W59 and pipeline contractors working to CSA Z662 face the same basic question from their clients, and the certificate register answers it the same way.

How it connects to the rest of the ERP

The app links to planning, billing and people records:

Inspection results live in the NDT Reports app. If a client wants results on a 3D model of a vessel or piping system, that is Atlantis's companion product, Digital Twin Reporting Software, which works alongside the ERP.

People data, language and access

Issue records, approvals and condition notes contain technicians' names and, in the Certificates app, their qualifications. Canadian privacy law, PIPEDA and in Alberta and British Columbia the provincial personal information protection acts, expects that personal information is used for stated purposes and protected. Atlantis ERP's access rights let you decide who can see what: storemen see the equipment and holders, managers see approvals, and technicians see what is issued to them. Retention and access policies are agreed during implementation.

If you operate in Quebec or have French-speaking crews, French is a standard Atlantis ERP language, and the interface language is set per user. Any French-language document layouts you need are part of the implementation scope.

Setting it up for a Canadian company

We start with your current register, usually a spreadsheet per base, and import serials, types, asset tags, firmware, accessories, holders and lifecycle stages. Current calibration certificates are loaded with PDFs, lab accreditation numbers and due dates so alerts work from day one. Your Level III agrees calibration frequencies per equipment type, and managers agree the approval steps for issuing radiography equipment and high-value units.

Stores and consumable reorder levels are set per base, for example Edmonton, Calgary and a site store at a camp. Alert recipients, look-ahead days and resend intervals are configured for your QA manager, radiation safety officer and equipment coordinator. Anything client-specific is agreed as customisation scope up front. Cost is quoted on request: affordable, accessible and fully customisable. Book an Asset Management demo with your own equipment list.

Oil sands turnarounds and mine-site work

Spring and autumn turnarounds at Alberta upgraders and oil sands processing plants pull in more NDT equipment than most companies own. For a few weeks, every phased array unit, every TOFD set and every spare thickness gauge is spoken for, and contractors rent kit from each other and from rental houses to cover the peak. That is exactly when double-booking happens and when rented-in instruments arrive with certificates nobody has checked.

Reservations with clash prevention make the turnaround plan honest. When a unit is booked for the upgrader job from one date to another, nobody else can book the same serial for overlapping dates, and the conflict shows up at the moment of booking instead of on the first morning of the turnaround. Rented-in kit is recorded like any other item, with its serial, accessories and calibration certificate loaded into the register before it goes to site, so the client's inspector sees the same evidence for a rented UT set as for one you own.

Mine-site work brings its own mix. Magnetic particle and ultrasonic inspection of heavy mining equipment, shovels, crushers and structural components means a lot of yokes, probes and consumables going to sites where the store is a sea container and the nearest resupply is hours away. Consumable reorder levels and the movement ledger per job tell your store what a mine-site job actually uses, so the next shipment is sized from data rather than memory.

After the peak, the issued equipment overdue KPI shows what did not come back when the job closed. Condition recorded at return separates normal wear from damage, and damaged kit moves to the in-repair stage before it can be issued again. Your own units hired out during the turnaround carry the rented-out stage and rental rates, so finance and operations are looking at the same list when the job is billed.

Repair, replacement and knowing when to retire kit

Every Canadian NDT manager has a unit that is always either in repair or about to be. Without a history, the decision to keep fixing it or replace it is made on gut feel. The Asset Management app turns that into a record you can read.

Each serial's maintenance log shows every corrective job, repair, cable replacement, probe replacement and firmware update, with condition before and after. Movement records show how many weeks the unit spent away at a service centre, often across the border, and the lifecycle stage shows how long it sat in repair instead of working. In Purchase, repair and calibration orders are linked to the same serial, so the spend on that one instrument is visible in one place rather than spread across a year of supplier invoices.

With that picture, retiring a unit becomes a straightforward decision. Set it to retired, and it drops out of the available pool for reservations and issue while its full history stays on record for any audit that asks about work it did in the past. When it finally leaves the company, the disposed stage closes the record. The same logic applies to calibration blocks that have been damaged or worn, probes that no longer meet your verification checks and survey meters that keep failing calibration.

For radiography equipment, retirement and disposal of devices and source containers also have regulatory steps under your CNSC licence. The app records the equipment side, while the licence steps stay with your radiation safety officer, supported by any extra fields agreed during implementation.

Frequently asked questions

Can it record Standards Council of Canada accreditation details?

Yes. The certificate register stores the lab accreditation number, each calibration has an accredited-lab flag, and lab vendors in Purchase carry accreditation number and expiry.

Does it keep our CNSC licence records?

It manages the equipment side: device and survey meter serials, calibrations, maintenance, issue and return, movements. Licence-format records are scoped during implementation if you want them in the ERP.

Does Atlantis NDT train technicians for CGSB certification?

No. Atlantis's training is based on ASNT SNT-TC-1A. The ERP simply records ISO 9712 certifications held by your technicians.

Is this software for managing our clients' plant?

No. It manages your company's own NDT instruments, probes, calibration blocks and consumables.

Can it handle multiple bases and site stores?

Yes. Stores, consumables and reorder levels are set per location, and movements show kit going between them.

Talk to us

Tell us how many bases you run and roughly what equipment you hold. Request an Asset Management quote and we will show you a setup that fits.

Asset Management by region

Works with

Send an enquiry about Asset Management · All ERP apps · Atlantis NDT ERP

Built for any business that runs on operations

Most companies do not fail at their craft. They lose time, margin and goodwill in the gaps between the tools they use to run the place — a quoting spreadsheet that does not talk to the job sheet, a job sheet that does not reach accounts, and a compliance folder nobody can search when a client asks. Atlantis closes those gaps by putting the whole operation on one platform, so information is entered once and everything downstream stays in step.

What you can run on it

  • Sales and CRM — leads, quotes, follow-ups and the pipeline that tells you what next month looks like.
  • Projects and job costing — plan the work, track the hours and materials against it, and see the margin while the job is still live rather than at final account.
  • Field and service teams — dispatch, schedules, mobile capture that works with no signal, and sign-off from site.
  • Inventory and purchasing — stock, suppliers, reorder points and goods receipt, joined to the jobs that consume them.
  • People — records, qualifications and licences with renewal reminders, timesheets, leave and payroll.
  • Quality and documents — procedures and forms under revision control, with the audit trail an inspection or accreditation body actually asks for.
  • Accounts — invoicing, expenses, multi-currency and the reporting your accountant stops chasing you for.

Affordable, accessible, fully customizable — and we mean each word

Affordable because the whole suite is included rather than sold to you a module at a time, and because implementation is done by people who have run operations rather than by a chain of subcontractors. Accessible because it runs in a browser and on a phone, works for a small team on day one, and does not need a specialist on staff to keep it alive. Fully customizable because your process is the thing that makes you competitive — the software should bend to it, not the other way round.

Industries we configure for

Service businesses and contractors, manufacturing and fabrication, trading and distribution, laboratories and testing houses, engineering consultancies, construction and facilities, and asset owners across energy, marine, aerospace and infrastructure. Inspection and testing is where we started, and it remains the sector we go deepest in — but the platform underneath is general-purpose, and most of what it does has nothing to do with inspection at all.

What happens when you get in touch

A short conversation, not a sales sequence. We ask how the business runs today and where it hurts, show you the platform doing that work, and send a written quote shaped to your region, your team size and the scope you actually need. No obligation, nothing to install first, and no pressure to decide on the call. Reach out and tell us what you are trying to fix.

Related: business management platform · inspection management software · choosing the right category of software · modules · by industry · asset integrity platform. Book a free consultation.

Speak to an ASNT NDT Level III

Atlantis NDT provides ASNT Level III consulting, NDT training to ASNT SNT-TC-1A, inspection management software and independent report validation. Request a free consultation and we will return a tailored quote — affordable, accessible and fully customizable to your programme.