Digitising Non-Destructive Testing

In January 2019, eviFile was successful in securing a contract with Drax Power LTD (DPL), following a rapid tender process that started at the end of November 2018. The aim of the Drax project was to deliver a solution for the Non-Destructive Testing (NDT’s) Inspection Management of Outages at Drax power station in Selby, North Yorkshire.

During an outage between 3000 and 8000 Non-Destructive Test are completed on different fittings, pipework and machinery involved in the electricity generation process.

Drax required a digital cloud-based solution that allowed them to not only manage each stage of the testing process, but also to ensure that they capture evidence to support each test — so that they could start to track trends over a number of outages.

Following the success of this tender, we are currently working in partnership with Drax to enhance and improve the solution via an agile methodology designed to deliver 100% of the solution in eviFile, ensuring that each of their outage contractors – who ultimately will use eviFile – are involved in the building of the digital solution.

The real need was to create a digital asset sharing platform across DPL and 3 sub-contractor networks providing a single version of the truth in real time. This includes real time transfer of digital evidence and documents as well as encrypted and secure cloud based storage accredited to CREST and critical infrastructure levels.

Although the solution was very much focussed on visibility, one of the more complex aspects of the solution was configuration of complex roles and permissions to ensure that all users only get the information that are meant to view at the right time in the workflow.

This enabled the teams to work on their priorities more simply and also for system administrators to pick up on where the chain of evidence had broken down, or simply needed to be moved along with more haste.

We understand that if the technology isn’t adopted by the engineers and site workers on the ground, then the significant efficiency, cost reduction and instant reporting benefits will not be maximised. As such we involve both managers, engineers and site workers into our workshops to get their input and more importantly engagement in how the technology will make their job easier.

With thousands of NDT’s in play, it was essential a powerful, yet intuitive search capability was implemented – making all records and evidence instantly locatable regardless of source.

This includes the photographs, video and documents included – this was a key requirement from Drax and one that eviFile supports out of the box with Tags, custom search fields driven by AWS’ powerful elastic search components

All meta data can be clearly tagged and managed through eviFile’s flexible control panel, enabling new tags to be added or amended on the fly (by those with the relevant privileges) and applied to media in bulk.

Linked with the powerful search engine within eviFile, this made the location and distribution of inspections and their associated media a tasks that can be done in seconds, with all information linking back to eviFile’s truly scalable AWS setup.

Drax required linkages through a number of different systems (Such as Oracle Maximo) and a custom solution such as Weld Eye. These were achieved through the customisation of eviFile’s powerful import capability which can accept custom CSV and Excel files as well as can be connected to such applications and API’s as Primavera P6.

Every action on every inspection record needed to be included in a real time report, enabling a full audit trail to be viewed or exported at any stage, providing full digital progressive assurance of every inspection or repair, and across every digital file held in the solution.

All eviFile’s data storage is also heavily encrypted and is only accessible through the platform ensuring that all reports were tamper free and fit for distribution to Drax’s insurers.

All of the data needed to be reported in real time, so a number of custom reports displaying the exact status of every inspection were configured and the data from these reports was available on platform or through an export/API call for inclusion in other solutions such as Power BI or Tableau.

This provided a robust mechanism to move data into the platform and to also make it available for any wider reporting needs.

The end to end NDT testing process is highly complex, with many different tiers of management, sub-contractors and insurers being involved at various stages of the outage process. As part of the professional services layer we provide with eviFile, we have reviewed the existing process to ensure they are as “lean” as possible before we digitise them.

We understand that moving from a primarily paper-based environment means that processes can be stripped back to ensure they are as efficient as possible when we move them to be managed in eviFile.s – which could take months using traditional methods. Our digital evidence can’t be tampered with which also helps utility companies, contractors and regulators all avoid costly legal disputes.”

Commenting on the technology, head of construction services at United Utilities, William Eyre, added: “We’re very driven to improve the visibility of the health of our projects – and eviFile is the tool to do it. We now have a much more efficient, accurate and secure way of reporting on progress of construction against our delivery schedule and on key issues like environment, quality and health and safety.

“Introducing this technology has brought benefits across the whole project supply chain, for contractors, field operatives, project managers, stakeholders and regulators. Despite the challenges posed by Covid, we expect the project to be completed on time, in 2022.”

Once complete, the 100km pipeline will link West Cumbria’s Thirlmere reservoir with the rest of the region’s water network, to bring a more reliable and sustainable supply to West Cumbria by 2022.

eviFile’s growing presence in the marketplace – as an agile digitised workflow solution – is already having a positive impact on overhead projects in rail, critical infrastructure pipelines, and non-destructive testing in the power sector. Clients include major contractors and service providers such as VolkerRail, Network Rail, SPL, United Utilities, and Drax.

Not only that, but issues, snags, and non-conformity requests can be collected by an engineer in real-time. These problems can then be taken through a separate workflow process – streamlining their progression to approval. As a result, any project hurdles – and potential delays – are not only allocated, tracked, and managed towards completion in real-time, but remain digitally-linked to the main asset.

As well as this, all data reporting is in real-time through eviFile’s Power BI reporting suite – showing planned progress vs. actual, while also delivering project-based business information analytics in seconds. If needed, changes can be made instantaneously, and reports delivered rapidly.

For all service desk needs, eviFile implemented Jira service desk from Atlassian. Jira service desk allows users to log issues directly from the device that they are working from quickly and efficiently.

The Service Desk will be used to manage serviced project setup, issue management and self-service project setup support.

All support is included in our license costs and is uncapped. The main benefits of using the service desk are:

The service desk for DPL enhanced our efficiency. It serves as a centralised location for all of our customer service communications.

Our service desk is a customer service hub that allows the inflowing activity to come into one place, this makes our workflow more efficient.

DPL required a seamless experience when they interact with us. Customers are met with consistency wherever or however they contact the business, a business response is uniform across all platforms, and business response time is predictable allowing for SLAs. When all of these factors work together, it creates a seamless experience.

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