The administration related to Weld Management has been increased significantly and is getting more complicated with new standards and changing laws. Every weld produced needs to be traceable for as long as the structure is used. Managing all this information is a hell of a job. For every weld, a significant amount of information needs to be filed. Think about the material certificates, the welder and the NDT report. This information should be organized, stored and easily retrieved when some authority asks for it.
Old School
A significant amount of companies handle weld traceability with a combination of Word and Excel files. There is nothing wrong with this technique, it just costs a lot of time and is prone to mistakes. The files are printed and left somewhere in the shop, and the information is added by pencil. The manually written data then needs to be typed into a digital Excel file, which holds all the information for the weld and the weld register. A big problem is that not all the necessary information is available to the people in the shop. If the information is available, it is often outdated and unusable. Next to the Excel file, a lot of data is stored in other places such as drawings, material certificates and welding procedures. When the dossier needs to be created at the end of the project, all of this information needs to be gathered from every corner of the office or shop and compiled. Even at this stage, a lot of information is missing which costs a lot of time and duplicated activities just for the sake of reporting.
Digital Age
Having all the information at the fingertips on a tablet will of course decrease the overall administration of the welds. Besides the time saved, it also reduces the number of errors in the data. The information will be created exactly at the point when the actions have taken place. The material certificates will be linked to the weld right when the weld has been created by the administration. Then when the welder is done the administration is updated right away. Every person involved in the process has the latest and most up-to-date information which prevents duplicated activities and increase efficiencies. The time saved is tremendous.
Analyzing
When the data is gathered, the company can really start to analyze the welds. Lead-time of a weld can be monitored quite easily, material ready for welding can be managed and planned, and reworks can be analyzed. The company can start to find relationships in the data, like for example which weld type leads to the highest reworks or whether reworks are going up when the lead time of a weld goes down. Hence, digitalization not only gives companies the chance to introduce efficiencies in the process, it also allows for analysis of the data to improve the process even further.
