DIGITIZATION OF FLANGE INSPECTION PROCESS

MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY

BRIEF

PDM is an expert company in the manufacturing industry that aims to professionalize the high-tech process and help manufacturing industries to excel in the market. An example of its service is to assign an inspector (an expert) to perform flange inspections during a turnaround at the client’s industrial plant. During this scheduled event, the entire process unit of an industrial plant is shut down for maintenance activities.

Performing flange inspections used to be prone to errors, slow and a very labor-intensive process. Maintenance activities were controlled using standard paper checklists. It means that an inspector had to check off countless of inspection criteria and then manually converted the information into excel files by the end of the day. Just imagine the amount of work!

With a team of four developers and one project manager, we helped PDM to develop digital tools to support inspectors during a turnaround. The results? Increased working efficiency and faster response due to real-time inspection results. During this project, we supported PDM in:

Developing a portal that allows a faster inspection preparation
Developing an inspection app that enables a quicker and easier flange inspection
Developing a Power BI dashboard that shows real-time inspection results.

THE CONCEPT

For a better and faster inspection preparation, we developed a portal that allows you to add flanges that need to be inspected, appoint the right contractors & engineers and assign inspectors that will perform the inspections. Our team developed an app to assist the inspectors during the flange inspections. Using the app, they can quickly go through the control checklists, and this way can focus more on performing the inspection itself. They also get the option to add extra notes and upload related photo’s into the app. Lastly, we also developed a Power BI dashboard that shows real-time inspection results so crucial actions can be taken immediately.

CUSTOMER CHALLENGE

The whole flange inspection process used to be very labor-intensive, slow, and prone to errors. During a turnaround, inspectors need to inspect works of hundreds of mechanics per day. It also means that hundreds of control checklists need to be entered manually in the excel files by the end of the day. The inspections results were analyzed late during the day. The consequent? Crucial actions could only be taken the next day instead, due to the lack of real-time data available.

MEDIAAN IN ACTION

To provide the best possible solution, we put together a team of front & back-end developers and a project manager. During this project, our team used the following techniques:

Angular
.NET
Microsoft Azure

Power BI
SQL server
Scrum/ agile

RESULTS

Thanks to the portal, the inspection app, and the Power BI dashboard, it is now possible to:

Access real-time inspection results which allow a faster response to take crucial actions
Prepare & manage the inspection faster using the inspection app
Perform benchmarking due to the availability of digital data
Get a better insight into the situation on-site due to the ability to add notes and upload pictures

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