NDT Client and Contact Management: One Address Book for Every Site

One address book for clients, sites, vendors and technicians. Request a demo. Affordable. Accessible. Fully customizable. Quote on request.

The contact problem in an NDT company

Ask any NDT operations manager where a client's site contact details live, and the honest answer is often 'somewhere'. The purchasing contact is in the sales manager's phone. The site HSE coordinator who arranges your inductions is in last year's email thread. The invoice address is on a PDF from the client's accounts team. The plant's QA/QC manager, the person who actually signs off your reports, is known only to the technician who was on site last time.

That scatter costs real time and money. Technicians turn up at the wrong gate because the address on file was the head office. Invoices sit unpaid because they went to the engineer instead of accounts payable. A report goes to someone who left the client six months ago. A good client relationship walks out of the door when your salesperson does, because nobody else had the details.

NDT work makes this worse than most industries. One client can have a head office in one city, three plants in different regions, a separate accounts payable team, and different people approving work at each site. Add EPCs, fabrication shops, third-party inspection agencies, calibration labs, equipment dealers, subcontractors and individual learners booking training, and the address book of a mid-sized inspection company becomes large and messy fast.

The Contacts app in the Atlantis NDT ERP is Atlantis ERP's standard Contacts app, set up for an NDT company. It is the single address book every other app uses: CRM, quotations, projects, reports, invoicing, purchasing, email marketing and eLearning. Enter a client once, correctly, and every part of the business works from the same record.

Companies, people and sites: how the address book is structured

Atlantis ERP Contacts distinguishes between companies and individuals, and links people to the company they work for. That simple structure fits NDT work well.

• The client company is one record: legal name, tax ID, main address, payment terms, and the salesperson who owns the relationship.
• People at the client are individual contacts linked to that company, each with their own job position, email and phone: the maintenance planner, the inspection engineer, the QA/QC manager, the buyer, the HSE coordinator.
• Addresses can be added under the company as separate records, typed as invoice addresses, delivery addresses or other addresses. For an NDT company, that means the head office, the accounts payable address and each plant or yard where your crews actually work can all sit under one parent.

When you create a quotation or an invoice, you choose the right address for the right purpose. The quote goes to the buyer, the invoice goes to the invoice address, and the job carries the actual site. The client's history, everything you have quoted, done and invoiced, still rolls up to one company.

This matters for a question every owner asks eventually: how much work did we do for this client last year, across all their sites? With a proper company-and-people structure, the answer is on the company record rather than at the end of a week of spreadsheet work.

It also matters when people move on. When a client's inspection engineer changes jobs, you archive their contact, add the replacement under the same company, and the history stays with the company instead of disappearing with one person.

Every kind of contact an NDT company deals with

An inspection company's address book holds far more than clients. The Contacts app keeps them all in one place, and tags make it easy to tell them apart.

Clients and end users

Refineries, petrochemical plants, power stations, fabrication shops, shipyards and aerospace maintenance shops: the companies that pay for inspection, training and consulting.

EPCs and main contractors

Often your direct client on a project, with the asset owner standing behind them. You may need to track both, and be clear about which one you invoice.

Vendors and calibration labs

Equipment manufacturers, dealers and calibration laboratories are contacts too. In the Purchase app, a vendor can be classed as an OEM, a dealer or a calibration lab, with an accredited-lab flag, accreditation number and expiry date. Those details sit on the same vendor record your purchasing team already uses.

Subcontractors and partner companies

When you bring in another NDT company for a method you don't cover, or extra crew during a shutdown, their details belong in the same address book as everyone else.

Learners and training sponsors

People who enrol in your courses, and the employers who pay for them. Learners given access to the eLearning portal are contacts with portal accounts.

Third-party inspection agencies

The inspectors and agencies who witness your work on behalf of clients and whose names appear on your reports.

Keeping all of these in one place avoids the classic problem of the same company existing in three systems with three spellings and three different phone numbers.

Tags and segments for inspection, training and consulting

Tags are the simplest tool in the Contacts app, and one of the most useful. A contact can carry as many tags as you like, and you can filter, group and target campaigns by them.

A sensible tag scheme for an NDT company usually covers four things:

• Relationship: client, prospect, past client, vendor, calibration lab, subcontractor, learner, training sponsor.
• Industry sector: oil and gas, petrochemical, power, fabrication, marine, aerospace, nuclear, structural.
• Interest: the methods and services they buy or have asked about, such as UT, PAUT, RT, MT, PT, TOFD, training, procedure writing or Level III services.
• Role: decision maker, technical approver, buyer, site contact, accounts.

With that in place, useful lists take seconds to build. All technical approvers at petrochemical clients. All past learners who took Level I and might be ready for Level II. All fabrication shop buyers who asked about MT and PT in the last year. All calibration labs you use.

Those lists feed straight into the Email Marketing and AI Marketing apps. A training intake announcement goes to learners and training sponsors, not to your calibration lab. A note about your phased array capability goes to inspection engineers at plants, not to the accounts payable team.

We agree the tag scheme with you during implementation. It is better to start with a short, consistent list that everyone uses than a long one nobody remembers. Tags can always be added later as your business grows into new sectors or methods.

Everything about a client on one screen

Open a client's company record and the smart buttons along the top show what is linked to it: opportunities in the CRM, quotations and sales orders, invoices, and other records from the apps you use. One click takes you to the list.

Below that, the record's history holds the conversation: emails sent and received from inside the ERP, notes logged by your team, scheduled activities, and changes to key fields. When a client calls with a question, whoever answers can see what was last discussed, what was quoted and whether anything is overdue.

For an NDT company this pays off in everyday situations:

• A repeat enquiry: the client asks for 'the same as last time'. You can see the previous quote, the sales order and the job it became.
• A payment chase: accounts can see outstanding invoices for the client and the right invoice contact without asking sales.
• A handover: a salesperson leaves, and their clients' history is still on the records, not locked in a personal inbox.
• A mobilisation: the operations manager checks the site address and site contact before sending a crew, instead of asking around the office.

Commercial settings live on the contact too: payment terms, tax ID, fiscal position and bank details, which Atlantis ERP uses on quotations and invoices. Set them correctly once and every document for that client inherits them. Tax rules for each country you work in are configured during implementation.

Keeping the data clean

An address book is only useful if people trust it. A few habits and standard tools keep it clean.

Import once, properly

Most NDT companies start with contacts spread across spreadsheets, an old accounting package and email. Atlantis ERP imports contacts from CSV or Excel files, with column mapping. During implementation we help bring in your existing clients, sites and vendors, and place people under their companies.

Deal with duplicates

'Acme Refining', 'ACME Refinery Ltd' and 'Acme Ref.' are the same client. Atlantis ERP's standard tools let you find and merge duplicate contacts, so the history ends up on one record.

Capture new people at the source

New contacts should arrive through proper channels: website enquiry forms that create CRM leads, lead import, or the Business Cards app. With Business Cards, you photograph a card at a trade show or on a site visit, AI/OCR extracts the name, company, title, email, phones and website, and one click creates a CRM lead or adds the person to a mailing list. No re-typing, no typos in email addresses.

Archive rather than delete

When someone leaves a client, archive their contact. It disappears from everyday lists but stays attached to past quotes, jobs and invoices.

Give it an owner

Someone should own contact quality, usually a sales coordinator or office manager. A short weekly look at new records catches most problems before they spread into quotes and invoices.

Contacts and marketing: reaching the right people

Once your contacts are organised, marketing stops being guesswork. The Contacts app is the source of the people and companies that the marketing apps work with.

• Email Marketing sends newsletters and campaigns to mailing lists or filtered contacts, and tracks opens and clicks. See the Email Marketing app.
• AI Marketing drafts campaign emails with AI and runs drip sequences by service line.
• CRM scores leads and can enrol them in drip sequences.

Opt-outs matter. When a contact unsubscribes from marketing email, Atlantis ERP records it and excludes them from further mass mailings. Respecting that is good manners and, in many countries, a legal requirement. Your obligations under local privacy and marketing laws are for you to decide with your advisers; the ERP gives you the tools to record and honour people's choices.

A good contacts structure also lets you say something relevant. A plant engineer who has hired you for UT thickness surveys might want to hear about a new phased array capability. A past learner might want to know about the next Level II intake, and that learners on your eLearning portal practise on Practical NDT, Atlantis's immersive 3D practice platform with UT, PAUT, RT, MT, PT, VT, ET and TOFD scenarios on virtual welds, pipes, vessels and castings. A QA/QC manager might want to see inspection results placed on a 3D model of their asset with Digital Twin Reporting Software, Atlantis's companion product to the ERP's NDT Reports app. Each of those messages depends on knowing who the person is and what they care about.

Portal access for clients and learners

Atlantis ERP lets you give a contact portal access: a login to a customer area on your company's site. For an NDT company that serves two groups well.

Clients with portal access can see the quotations and invoices you have sent them, and accept and sign quotes online. That removes a lot of 'can you resend the PDF?' emails, and a signed quote converts to a sales order without anyone re-typing it.

Learners in the eLearning portal are contacts with portal accounts. Admins create learner accounts and grant or revoke access to courses. Enrolled learners see their courses, video lessons and quizzes, plus a Practical NDT section that opens the 3D practice platform. Access to Practical NDT is granted automatically on enrolment or manually by an admin.

Because both groups are contacts, one record can show that a person is a learner, which employer sponsored them, and what they have been sent. When that learner later becomes a buyer or an inspection engineer at a client, which happens often in a small industry, the relationship is already in your system.

Portal access is optional. Many clients are happy with a PDF by email, and you can grant accounts only where they help. Portal users see only their own documents, and you decide during implementation who gets an account and what they can see.

Who uses Contacts

• Sales and business development: create and qualify contacts, keep job titles and roles current, tag by interest.
• Operations and dispatch: look up site addresses and site contacts before a crew mobilises; check who at the client approves reports.
• Accounts: maintain invoice addresses, payment terms and tax IDs; see outstanding invoices per client.
• Purchasing: maintain vendors and calibration labs, including the accreditation details held in the Purchase app.
• Training coordinator: manage learners, sponsoring employers and portal access.
• NDT Level III and report reviewers: find the right technical contact at the client to receive reports and discuss procedures.
• Owner: see total activity per client across sites and service lines.

Access rights decide who can edit what. It is common to let everyone view contacts, restrict who can create new companies, and limit changes to payment terms and tax details to the accounts team.

In a small NDT company, the same two or three people may cover all of these roles. That is exactly when one shared address book helps most, because nobody has time to keep three separate lists in step.

How Contacts connects to the rest of the ERP

Contacts is the shared backbone. Nearly every other app links to it.

Because it is one database, a correction made once, such as a new invoice address, applies everywhere from then on. There is no separate CRM, accounting package and mailing tool to keep in step, and no export-import routine between them. See how all the apps fit together on the Atlantis NDT ERP page.

Setup and implementation

Atlantis NDT deploys and configures the ERP for you. For Contacts, the work typically includes:

1. Agreeing the structure: how to represent clients with several plants, EPCs and asset owners, and training sponsors.
2. Agreeing a tag scheme for relationship, sector, interest and role.
3. Importing existing contacts from spreadsheets, your accounting package or an old CRM, and merging obvious duplicates.
4. Setting up payment terms, tax settings and fiscal positions for the countries you work in.
5. Creating vendor records for your equipment suppliers and calibration labs.
6. Connecting website enquiry forms, the Business Cards app and mailing lists.
7. Deciding who gets portal access and setting access rights for your team.
8. A short training session so everyone enters contacts the same way.

Anything beyond standard Contacts, such as extra fields you want on a client record, is part of the customization scope agreed with you. The ERP is affordable, accessible and fully customizable, and pricing is quote on request. Book a Contacts demo to see it with your own kind of clients and sites.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Contacts app custom-built?

No. It is Atlantis ERP's standard Contacts app, configured for an NDT company with a tag scheme, address structure, vendor records and access rights that suit inspection, training and consulting work. Extra fields are part of the customization scope if you need them.

Can one client have several plants or sites?

Yes. The client is one company record, and each plant, yard or office can be added underneath as an invoice, delivery or other address. Quotes, jobs and invoices use the right address while the history rolls up to the client.

Can we import our existing client list?

Yes. Contacts can be imported from CSV or Excel files with column mapping. During implementation we help structure people under their companies and clean up the obvious problems first.

How do we avoid duplicate companies?

Use Atlantis ERP's standard tools to find and merge duplicates, capture new people through website forms, lead import or the Business Cards app rather than free typing, and give one person responsibility for contact quality.

Are vendors and calibration labs in the same address book?

Yes. They are contacts like everyone else. The Purchase app adds vendor type (OEM, dealer or calibration lab), an accredited-lab flag, accreditation number and expiry.

Can clients see their own quotes and invoices?

Yes, if you give them portal access. They can view documents you have sent and accept and sign quotes online. Portal access is optional and controlled by you.

What does it cost?

It depends on your users, the apps you need and the customization scope, so pricing is by quote on request.

Put your client list in order

If your client details are spread across phones, spreadsheets and old email threads, a single address book is one of the quickest wins an ERP can give an NDT company. It is also the foundation for everything else: better quotes, correct invoices, crews at the right gate and marketing that reaches the right people.

Book a demo or request a quote for the Atlantis NDT ERP.

Works with

• CRM: Leads and opportunities for inspection, training and consulting work.
• Quotations: Inspection quotes built from rates, crews and scope, sent for e-signature.
• AI Marketing: AI-assisted outreach and campaign content for NDT buyers.
• Email Marketing: Newsletters and campaigns to clients and prospects.
• Business Cards: Scan business cards from site visits and trade shows straight into CRM.
• Website: Company website and enquiry forms connected to CRM.

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