What if I told you there’s more to Pipeline Integrity than ILI and Digs?

By Jennifer Stanier, p. Eng.,
Management System Consultant - Systems Builder | Communication Simplifier | Continuous Improvement Driver

Yep, it's true.

How do the various integrity personnel interact with one another: employees, contractors, consultants, and vendors? Each has data, experience, expertise, and opinions to contribute. How do these come together in making decisions?

Is everyone clear on the scope of work each is responsible for? What about accountabilities and responsibilities for each? Are they clear? Who has final authority to approve (or not) whatever decision has been reached? How are disagreements resolved?

What assumptions are understood when working with an external party’s (consultant, vendor, etc.) software or models? Are these clearly understood and documented? If they were to change for any reason, would you be notified? How would the change affect your risk acceptance criteria or how you carry out engineering assessments? Would an MOC be completed?

How does your integrity team interact with other teams in your company, for example, damage prevention? What are the triggers for integrity to become involved in the review of third-party crossing requests? Is that documented and clear? Is your team adequately staffed to provide that support? When an integrity team member approves or signs off on a request, is it clear what exactly they are approving and taking responsibility for? Is this documented somewhere?

Have you ruled out one or more integrity threats based on having a solid understanding of pipe manufacturing practices, a complete set of MTRs, a high degree confidence in your external coating, and predictable operating conditions? Have you documented the rationale behind ruling out these threats? If any of these attributes that are providing confidence were to change as a result of changes to operating conditions or learnings from repairs being carried out in the field, how would this information be recorded and factored into a re-review of threat identification or future engineering assessments?

If all the above is clearly documented and understood in your company, please get in touch. I would like to work for you. If not, get in touch and I can help you get this all figured out and documented.