NDT Crew Dispatch and Technician Scheduling in Canada

Assign qualified technicians and crews to jobs by method, level and availability. Request a demo. Affordable. Accessible. Fully customizable. Quote on request.

Why NDT scheduling in Canada is different

An NDT company in Canada plans around three things that most other markets do not face all at once: distance, winter and rotation. A technician in Edmonton may fly north to a site camp for two weeks, fly home for two, and then drive to an upgrader in the Industrial Heartland for a spring turnaround. An Ontario crew may spend months preparing for a single nuclear outage window. A pipeline crew in northern Alberta or British Columbia may only be able to work some sections when the ground is frozen.

Add Canadian certification rules, where many clients expect technicians certified through the Natural Resources Canada scheme, and radiography licensed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the dispatcher's job becomes a matter of fitting qualified people, calibrated equipment and fixed rotation patterns into windows that do not move.

Team Assignments, part of Atlantis NDT ERP, is built for that kind of planning. Each job is a team assignment with a site, GPS coordinates, mobilisation and demobilisation dates, a crew and a list of equipment serial numbers. The technician availability calendar holds assigned, leave, training, sick and unavailable time, and blocks overlaps. Technicians and equipment cannot be double-booked, and the app warns when assigned equipment is out of calibration. Every technician shows a status, current assignment, utilisation percentage and next available date, and the whole plan can be viewed as a calendar, a kanban board or a list. Jobs move through five stages: planned, dispatched, in field, submitted and closed.

Oil sands rotations and camp-based work

Work in the Athabasca oil sands around Fort McMurray, and at in-situ projects further south, is built on rotations. Fly-in, fly-out schedules such as 14 days on and 14 off, 10 and 4, or 21 and 7 are common, with crews moving on charter flights from Edmonton, Calgary and other hubs and living in site camps. For an NDT company, a technician on rotation is committed for the whole hitch, and the days off are not available for another job in the city unless the technician agrees.

That makes the difference between leave and unavailable important. In Team Assignments, the hitch is the assignment, with mobilisation and demobilisation dates matching the charter days, so travel sits inside the booking. Rotational days off can be recorded as unavailable, which keeps them out of the dispatch pool without counting them as annual leave. Overlaps are blocked, so nobody accidentally books a technician for a Fort Saskatchewan job during the week they are supposed to be resting at home.

Camp work also means equipment leaves the yard for weeks at a time. Once an instrument is booked on a rotation job by serial number, it cannot be booked on another assignment for the same dates. The calibration warning matters more here than almost anywhere: a flaw detector whose calibration falls due mid-rotation is a problem you want to find before it goes north, not when a replacement has to be flown in. Calibration due dates come from the Asset Management app.

Utilisation shows how much of each technician's time is tied up in rotations, which helps when a client asks for extra crew on the next hitch and you need to know whether you can say yes.

Turnaround windows and working through winter

Refineries, upgraders and petrochemical plants in Alberta's Industrial Heartland north-east of Edmonton, and plants in Sarnia and elsewhere, usually schedule turnarounds for spring and fall. Few owners want to open major units in January at minus 30. That concentrates demand into a few months, and every NDT contractor in the province is looking for the same UT, PAUT and RT technicians at the same time.

Winter brings its own work. Some pipeline and northern projects are only accessible once muskeg and ice roads freeze, so construction and tie-in inspection shift into the cold months. Cold also affects the work itself: couplants, penetrants and magnetic particle media all have temperature limits, batteries run down faster, and set-up takes longer. Planners need to allow for that in the dates they promise.

Team Assignments helps a Canadian dispatcher in two ways. Ahead of turnaround season, the calendar and next available dates show real capacity months out, so commitments to owners are based on actual availability. During the season, the kanban view shows at a glance how many jobs are planned but not dispatched, how many crews are in the field and which submitted jobs are waiting on report review before they can be closed and invoiced. Mobilisation dates can be moved when a unit shutdown slips, and any new overlap with later jobs is blocked, not buried.

CGSB and NRCan ISO 9712 certification

In Canada, many owners and codes expect NDT personnel to be certified under the national scheme run by Natural Resources Canada to CAN/CGSB-48.9712, the Canadian adoption of ISO 9712. It is a third-party scheme: the certification belongs to the technician, is issued by NRCan, and must be renewed and recertified on a fixed cycle, with vision checks along the way. US-owned operators and some fabricators also ask for ASNT-based employer certification, so plenty of Canadian technicians hold both.

Atlantis NDT does not train or certify for the NRCan scheme, but the ERP records those certificates. The Certificates app stores each certification with its scheme (ISO 9712, SNT-TC-1A, CP-189 and others), level, method, certifying body, issue, expiry and renewal dates, OJT and training hours, and attachments. Status is calculated automatically as active, expiring soon, expired or revoked, and warning tasks appear 90 days before a cert or vision test expires. Daily email alerts can go to the Level 3, the QA manager and the dispatcher.

That matters at dispatch time. The coordinator building a crew for a pressure vessel repair can check who holds current NRCan UT Level 2 before adding them, and Timesheets warn if a technician's certification is not valid when hours are booked. If you want Team Assignments itself to check a technician's certificate against the method on the job, that can be configured during implementation.

Radiography under the CNSC

Industrial radiography in Canada is regulated federally by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Anyone operating an exposure device must be a CNSC-certified exposure device operator, and trainees work under the direct supervision of a certified operator. Radiography crews are typically nuclear energy workers with dose monitoring, and sources moving by road fall under Transportation of Dangerous Goods rules as well as CNSC packaging and transport regulations.

For scheduling, an RT job needs a certified exposure device operator, often a trainee or second worker, a specific exposure device, survey meters and a vehicle cleared for sources. Team Assignments books the people and the equipment serials on the same assignment, blocks the camera or meter from being booked on two jobs at once, and warns if an assigned survey meter or other instrument is out of calibration.

Each technician's NDT profile records radiation safety training and radiation badge number, and exposure device operator certificates can be recorded in Certificates with their expiry, so they trigger the same 90-day warnings as NDT certs. The Fleet app flags whether a vehicle can carry radioactive sources and holds its transport licence number and expiry, and vehicles are assigned to projects with dates and mileage.

The app does not replace your radiation protection programme or your licence conditions. It makes sure the dispatcher sees the right information at the moment they are putting a crew together.

ABSA, CSA standards and pipeline work

In Alberta, pressure equipment is regulated by ABSA, and repairs, alterations and new construction follow quality programmes that ABSA has accepted. Across Canada, CSA B51 governs boilers and pressure vessels, CSA W59 covers welded steel construction, and CSA Z662 sets the rules for oil and gas pipeline systems, with provincial regulators such as the Alberta Energy Regulator and the federal Canada Energy Regulator overseeing pipelines in their jurisdictions.

These codes shape the job, and the job shapes the crew. A Z662 tie-in may need RT or AUT crews synchronised with welding; a pressure equipment repair may need NDT booked around an inspector's witness point. The Project app holds the codes, methods, scope and acceptance criteria for each NDT job, while Team Assignments holds when it happens and who does it.

Pipeline and well-site work in western Canada often happens at locations described by legal land descriptions rather than street addresses. Recording site GPS coordinates on each assignment means the crew and the office know exactly which lease, dig or valve site they are heading to, which saves a lot of driving around gravel roads in the dark.

Ontario nuclear outages

Ontario's nuclear fleet, including the Bruce, Darlington and Pickering stations, runs planned outages for maintenance and refurbishment. For NDT contractors, outage work means long lead times, security clearances, site-specific radiation protection and orientation training, dose limits for each worker and very little tolerance for crews arriving late or short.

The planning horizon is months, not days. Team Assignments supports that by letting you book the outage crew early and keep them blocked. Pre-outage training and orientation days go into the availability calendar as training, so the dispatcher cannot quietly send an outage technician on a short job that runs into their orientation week. Time waiting on clearance processing can be held as unavailable.

Because every assignment carries mobilisation and demobilisation dates, the office can see exactly when outage crews become free, and the next available date on each technician tells sales when they can promise that person to another client. Utilisation shows whether committing so much of the team to one outage leaves enough capacity for the rest of your clients.

Site access, safety tickets and language

Canadian owners expect more than NDT certs. Many require contractors to hold a Certificate of Recognition safety programme, and in the energy sector crews are often asked for orientations and tickets such as a basic safety orientation, H2S Alive and site-specific training, all with expiry dates that owners check at the gate.

The Project app records safety induction and work permit fields for each job, so site requirements live with the job. Per-technician tracking of tickets such as H2S Alive, and flagging a missing ticket at dispatch, is configured during implementation as part of the customization scope agreed with you.

For companies working in Quebec or with bilingual crews, the underlying Atlantis ERP platform supports French as a user language, so coordinators and technicians can work in the language they prefer. Client-facing documents can be set up to suit your clients during implementation.

How it connects to the rest of the ERP

Team Assignments sits between the sale and the invoice. Upstream, Quotations and Project hold the scope, codes and client PO. Downstream, technicians log hours in Timesheets by work type (inspection, travel, standby, setup), which is useful when a weather-delayed charter turns a travel day into standby. Hours carry a billable flag and rate multiplier and flow into Invoicing, where labour, equipment and consumables are split out and GST, HST or PST are configured for your provinces during implementation. Camp allowances and field expenses go through Expenses for re-billing.

In the field, the NDT Reports offline app lets technicians pull the jobs and equipment assigned to them and write reports without signal, which is normal up north. Owners who want to see results in context can use our companion product, Digital Twin Reporting Software, which places inspection results on a 3D model of the asset. It is a separate product that works alongside the ERP.

For trainee technicians building hands-on skill, Practical NDT gives immersive 3D practice in UT, PAUT, RT, MT, PT, VT, ET and TOFD scenarios on virtual welds, pipes, vessels and castings, opened from the eLearning portal. Quiet weeks between hitches can become useful practice time without anyone travelling.

Setting it up in Canada

Atlantis NDT deploys and configures the ERP for you. A Canadian setup usually covers loading technicians with their NRCan, ASNT and CNSC certificates, loading equipment by serial with calibration dates, defining how rotations and rotational days off are recorded, connecting Time Off so approved leave and statutory holidays affect availability, setting access rights for branches in, say, Edmonton, Calgary and the GTA, and agreeing extra checks such as safety tickets. Coordinators are trained on their own live jobs.

It is fully customizable, and pricing is quote on request, kept affordable for small and mid-sized Canadian inspection companies. Book a Team Assignments demo to see it with your own rotation.

Frequently asked questions

Can it handle 14 and 14 rotations?

Yes. Book the hitch as an assignment with mobilisation and demobilisation dates on the charter days, and record rotational days off as unavailable. Overlaps are blocked, so the technician cannot be dispatched elsewhere during the hitch or their rest days without the clash being dealt with.

Does it record NRCan ISO 9712 certifications?

Yes, in the Certificates app, with level, method, certifying body and expiry, plus 90-day warnings and daily email alerts. Atlantis NDT does not provide NRCan training or certification; the ERP only records certificates your technicians hold.

Can it track CNSC exposure device operator certificates?

Yes. They can be recorded in Certificates with their expiry so they trigger the same warnings, and each technician's profile holds radiation safety training and badge number.

Will it stop an out-of-calibration instrument going north?

It warns you when assigned equipment is out of calibration, based on the calibration records in Asset Management, so you can swap the unit before it leaves the yard.

Does it support French?

The Atlantis ERP platform supports French as a user language. Templates and client-facing documents are set up to suit you during implementation.

How much does it cost?

Quote on request, based on users, apps and customization. Affordable, accessible and fully customizable.

Plan your next hitch in it

Send us your rough numbers: technicians, methods, rotations and regions. We will set up a demo that shows a realistic Canadian week, from a spring turnaround to a northern rotation. Request a quote or book a walkthrough.

Team Assignments by region

• Team Assignments global overview
• Team Assignments in United States
• Team Assignments in UK & Europe
• Team Assignments in Middle East
• Team Assignments in India

Works with

• Project: Inspection projects, tasks and milestones from award to final report.
• Timesheets: Technician hours per job, feeding payroll and client invoicing.
• Asset Management: NDT equipment by serial number: issue and return, reservations, calibration and maintenance history.
• Maintenance: Preventive and corrective maintenance requests for instruments, vehicles and site equipment.
• Fleet: Vehicles, drivers and service records for field crews.
• Calendar: Shared schedules for jobs, audits and client meetings.
• To-do: Personal and team task lists linked to jobs and records.

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