Refinery and petrochemical inspection software for NDT contractors

Why refinery and petrochemical inspection is a records business

An inspection contractor on a refinery or petrochemical site is paid for examinations and judged on records. The owner-user's integrity team does not see the technician on the pipe rack; it sees the report, often weeks later, and it loads that report into the system that drives its inspection plan. If a reading cannot be traced to a location, an instrument and a qualified person, it cannot be used, and an unusable reading is an examination the owner paid for twice.

The regulatory frame makes the record the product. Most refineries and many petrochemical plants fall under OSHA process safety management, whose mechanical integrity element requires inspections and tests to follow recognised and generally accepted good engineering practice and to be documented with the date, the person, the equipment identifier, the test and the result. The API inspection codes sit underneath: API 510 for pressure vessels, API 570 for piping and API 653 for tanks, each placing the programme with the owner-user and its certified inspectors.

That division matters when choosing software. The owner-user runs an integrity data system that holds condition monitoring locations, corrosion rates, intervals and risk rankings. The contractor runs the work that feeds it: jobs, crews, instruments, procedures and reports. Software that tries to be both usually does neither well for a contractor. The useful question for an NDT company is how completely, cleanly and quickly its own records reach the client.

Turnarounds: many crews, short windows, no signal

Turnarounds compress months of inspection into a few weeks, with multiple contractors, shift crews and scopes that change as vessels are opened. The failure modes are predictable. A technician is scheduled on two units at once. A flaw detector goes to a crew while its calibration has lapsed. Readings are written on paper inside a vessel, typed up at night by someone who was not there, and reach the client after the equipment is boxed up again.

Software for this work has to prevent the first two before they happen and remove the third. Crew and instrument assignments need to refuse double-booking and flag out-of-calibration equipment at the point of assignment, not at the audit. Field capture has to work inside a column or a drum with no signal at all, and sync when the technician comes out, so the report is drafted where the reading was taken rather than reconstructed later.

Review speed decides whether findings matter. A thinning reading or a rejectable weld found on the first night of a turnaround can still be repaired inside the window; the same finding reported a week later becomes a deferral or an extension. A report workflow that moves from draft to review to approval on the same day, with the reviewer working from the same record the technician captured, is worth more during a turnaround than any other feature.

Thickness readings: deliver the inputs, not the interval

Thickness surveys are the bulk of routine refinery inspection. The owner-user's integrity system turns readings at condition monitoring locations into short-term and long-term corrosion rates, remaining life and the next inspection date under API 510 or API 570, or feeds them into a risk-based inspection assessment. Those calculations are the owner's and the API inspector's, and they are only as good as the readings that arrive.

What the contractor controls is the quality of those inputs. Each reading needs its location in the client's own referencing, the instrument and probe used, the calibration status on the day, the technician and their certification, the procedure revision, and the date. Readings recorded by direction around a nozzle or an elbow need that orientation kept. Missing any of these turns a measurement into a number nobody can defend when it disagrees with the last survey.

Atlantis ERP records thickness work as UT thickness reports, with readings recorded by direction and the client's drawing and location references on the report, and with the technician and instrument behind them. It does not compute corrosion rates, remaining life or intervals, and it is not a CML register. That boundary is deliberate: the owner keeps one calculation, in its own system, and the contractor delivers the readings it runs on.

Weld examination, PMI and hardness on alloy and sour service

New construction, repairs and alterations during a turnaround bring weld examination under ASME B31.3 for process piping and ASME Section VIII for vessels, with the examinations themselves performed to ASME Section V. Radiography, ultrasonic testing, phased array and time-of-flight diffraction each carry their own technique data, and the report has to show what was examined, by which technique and procedure revision, what was found, and whether it was accepted.

Alloy and sour-service systems add two records most other industries never ask for. Positive material identification under an API RP 578 material verification programme confirms that each alloy component is the material specified, and the result has to stay tied to the component. Hardness surveys after welding and after post-weld heat treatment show that welds and heat-affected zones meet the limits set by NACE MR0103, published jointly as ISO 17945, or by the client's own specification.

Atlantis ERP has a separate report type for each of these: RT and computed radiography, UT, PAUT and TOFD for weld examination, PMI, hardness and PWHT, each with its own numbering sequence. Weld lines carry defect type and orientation, and each report ends with an overall result. That keeps a hardness survey from being filed as a free-text note on a UT report, which is how such records usually go missing.

Heat exchangers, coatings and the specialist methods

Exchanger bundles pulled during a turnaround are inspected tube by tube, typically with internal rotary inspection for ferrous tubes and eddy current for non-ferrous tubes, and the client wants to see which tubes were tested, what wall loss was found and which tubes were plugged. Coatings and linings on vessels and tanks are tested for holidays to NACE SP0188 or the client's specification before they go back into service.

These are short, specialist scopes that still have to land in the same record set as the main inspection. In Atlantis ERP, IRIS, ECT and holiday or coating tests each have their own report type, alongside magnetic flux leakage for tank floors, ferrite measurement for duplex and austenitic welds, and visual inspection with photos. The specialist crew uses the same field app and the same review and approval workflow as everyone else on the site.

Who did the work: certificates and instruments under PSM

Every report is only as defensible as the qualification of the person who signed it and the calibration of the instrument they used. Client specifications on refinery and petrochemical work commonly require NDE personnel certified under the employer's written practice to ASNT SNT-TC-1A or ANSI/ASNT CP-189, with current vision examinations, and many clients check certificates before a technician is allowed on site.

In Atlantis ERP each certificate records its scheme, level, method, certifying body and dates, with near-vision, far-vision and colour tests alongside. Status is worked out automatically, warning tasks are raised before a certificate or vision test lapses, and timesheets warn when a technician's certificate is not valid. Instruments, probes and other equipment are tracked by serial number with calibration certificates, due dates and expiry alerts, and issue and return run through an approval step with the condition recorded both ways.

Procedures sit in a register with document number, revision, method, applicable standard and acceptance criteria, moving through draft, review, approval and publication with approved revisions locked. When a client auditor asks which revision of your UT procedure a weld was examined to, the procedure reference is on the report and the approved revision is in the register.

What Atlantis ERP does for refinery and petrochemical inspection records

Atlantis ERP is the NDT contractor's system for this work. Jobs are planned with the client's purchase order, methods, codes, scope and acceptance criteria, then dispatched as team assignments with double-booking of technicians and equipment serial numbers blocked and a warning when out-of-calibration equipment is assigned. In the field, technicians capture method-specific reports offline. In the office, reports move through draft, review, approval and sending, with inspector, reviewer and approver signatures and the authorized inspector's name and signature where the client requires it.

Reports go out on your own versioned templates in Word, Excel, PDF or HTML, with Excel templates filled automatically by mapping fields to cells, which matters when each operator insists on its own format. The same job record carries the timesheets, with work type, method, billable flag and equipment serial, and the invoice. An open REST API connects to SAP, Maximo, NetSuite or other systems that accept API connections, scoped per implementation. See the NDT Reports app and the ERP for NDT companies.

The same system is set up for other industries too: tank inspection software for API 653 contractors, pipeline inspection software for US NDT contractors and aerospace NDT software for Nadcap suppliers.

What Atlantis ERP does not do on refinery and petrochemical work

It does not perform risk-based inspection under API RP 580 or API RP 581, fitness-for-service assessment under API 579-1, inspection-interval calculation under API 510, API 570 or API 653, corrosion-rate or remaining-life calculation, or damage-mechanism review under API RP 571. It does not hold the owner's equipment hierarchy or CML register, and it is not an integrity data management system.

Those belong to the owner-user's integrity programme and its own systems, and to the API inspectors who sign the evaluations. Atlantis does not compete with them. It makes sure that what reaches them from the contractor is complete: the reading or result, the location reference, the instrument and its calibration, the technician and their certificate, the procedure revision, and the review signature. If you are an owner-user looking for interval or risk software, our guide to NDT inspection software explains how the categories differ.

Choosing inspection software for refinery and petrochemical work

Score candidates on the turnaround, not the brochure. Assign a technician whose certificate has expired to a unit; issue an instrument past its calibration date; complete a PMI report and a hardness survey offline inside a vessel; return a weld report for correction and approve the revision; then export the job's reports in the format your largest client insists on. Each of those either works on the day or it does not.

Then check the boundary. Any vendor that offers to calculate your client's intervals or corrosion rates from inside contractor software is offering to create a second set of numbers the owner did not ask for. Keep the calculation where the owner keeps it, and make the readings perfect.

Atlantis ERP is affordable, accessible and fully customizable, configured to your methods, report formats and crews. Start a free trial and run one turnaround job through it, or book a guided walkthrough with an ASNT NDT Level III using your own reports.

Request a consultation