Technical Overview

How Turnaround QC works

Last updated 12 August 2026

A technical description for anyone who has to satisfy themselves the records will hold up — QA managers, inspection engineers, turnaround managers, and the person who signs a system back into service.

One record model, fifty-one sections

There are 51 record sections — systems, the work list, hold and witness points, the blind list, welder quals, weld log, fit-up, weld repairs, consumables, NDE, heat treatment, PMI, hardness, the static equipment register, vessel entries, trays and internals, exchanger bundles, thickness readings, repairs and alterations, relief valves, flange joints, reinstatement, test packages, pressure tests, flushing, and the QA, compliance, personnel and field-data sections around them.

They are not 51 separate systems. Every section stores its rows in the same underlying structure: one table, keyed by which section the row belongs to, with the fields held as structured data alongside it. A weld log entry and a relief valve bench record are the same shape to the database and differ only in which fields they carry.

That is why the table, the add and edit form, the CSV import and export, the search and the job book all behave identically in every section — there is one implementation, not 51. It is also why adding a section is a configuration change rather than a schema migration, and why a section you do not use costs you nothing but an unused tab.

The system is the spine, not the job number

A turnaround is not one job. It is several hundred jobs sharing an outage window and a single critical path, and the unit that is tested, walked down, punched and handed back is the system — not the work order, not the contract, and not the crew that did it.

So the system is the join. A system carries its work list, its isometrics, its welds, its joints, its blinds, its test packages, its punch list and, at the end, its mechanical completion certificate. That is what lets one question — can I take this system back? — be answered from one place rather than from five folders and a phone call.

Underneath that, two more references do the fine-grained joining. Piping records key off the isometric, because the iso is what the fitter is holding and what the weld number is written on. Vessel and exchanger records key off the equipment tag. Records in the piping, vessel, bolting and testing sections also carry a drawing reference, pointing at a row in Drawings or Isometrics — an NDE report that cannot say which iso it belongs to sends the reader off to find out, which is the cost this product exists to remove.

Three habits break this quietly, and none of them produces an error:

• Tag drift. 12-P-1104-A1A, 12P1104A1A and 12-P-1104 are legible to a human and match nothing. On a job with four thousand welds, that judgement has to be made four thousand times.
• Recording a tie-in as one weld. A spool cut into a line is two welds with two welders and, often, two dates. A record against “the tie-in” cannot say which one failed radiography.
• Leaving the system blank. A record with no system attaches to nothing, appears in no turnover package, and is invisible to the mechanical completion check that would otherwise have caught it.

What the Audit tab actually checks

It checks for gaps that would fail a turnover review, not for whether your work was good. It has no opinion on whether a weld passed; it has an opinion on whether the record can be trusted:

• instruments that produced a reading, cross-checked against their calibration dates — an out-of-calibration gauge, torque tool or UT set invalidates every record it produced, retrospectively
• blinds with an install signature and no removal signature, which is the one finding that is blocking rather than advisory
• hold and witness points that were never released
• weld repairs with no re-examination result
• qualifications and certifications approaching or past expiry — welder continuity, NDE certification, the vision exam that lapses on its own schedule, site badges
• records missing an attachment where the section expects one: an NDE result with no report, a heat treatment with no chart, a pressure test with no recorder trace, a relief valve with no bench report
• non-conformances and punch items still open
• sections with no records at all, against systems that exist in the register

It does not certify anything. It does not approve work, verify that a reading is correct, or reconcile counts against the field. If the register shows fourteen tie-in welds and there are thirteen NDE reports, the audit tells you a record is missing — it cannot tell you whether the fourteenth was examined and unrecorded, or never examined.

Coverage, and why a zero is not a failure

The audit reports coverage per section. A zero is not automatically a problem: plenty of outages have no exchanger bundles, no heat treatment, or no vessel entries at all. A zero means no records here, and only you know whether that is correct.

What matters is that a zero is visible and explicable. Thirteen systems with a reinstatement walkdown and one without reads as a system somebody had trouble with, whether or not that is true, and it is better to find that before the owner does.

The turnover job book

One click compiles every section into a cover-paged, indexed document on true letter pages. 48 of the 51 sections appear in it. Contracts and subcontracts do not, because commercial paper does not belong in a technical turnover package, and neither do crew timesheets — the crew's own hours are not the owner's business.

The order is the order a reviewer reads in: systems and scope first, then procedures, qualifications and calibration, then the work in the sequence it was done — isolation, piping, vessels, bolting, testing — then QA, then reinstatement, the punch list and mechanical completion. Sections with no records print as a section with no records rather than being silently dropped, so the reader can tell the difference between “nothing to report” and “nothing recorded”.

AI document reading

Point it at a scanned NDE report, a heat treatment chart, a relief valve bench report or a calibration certificate and the fields fill in for you to check. You confirm every value before it saves.

It never judges whether a document passes. It reads what is on the page and puts it in the right boxes; whether the result is acceptable is a question for a person with the code and the job spec in front of them.

Who can see what

Access is enforced by the database, not by the interface. Hiding a button changes nothing about what a request can retrieve, so every rule lives in row-level security policies that apply to every query regardless of where it came from.

• Owners see and change everything in their own projects.
• Team members see the projects they have been invited to and accepted. Deleting records is a permission granted per person, not automatic.
• Auditors are read-only across the project, and can raise their own punch items — which only they can edit. That is enforced in the database, so an auditor cannot quietly revise a finding after it has been answered, and nobody else can revise it for them.

If you stop paying

Your records remain readable and exportable for a retention window after cancellation. The database refuses writes during that period, so nothing changes underneath you, but you can still open the job book, export CSVs and take a full snapshot.

That is deliberate: a turnover package can be needed years later for a warranty claim, a repair history, or the next outage's inspection plan, and holding somebody's own quality records hostage is not a business model worth having.

The short version

One record model across 51 sections, joined by the system and, beneath it, by the isometric and the equipment tag. An audit that checks whether records can be trusted rather than whether work was good. A job book that compiles 48 of those sections into something an owner can accept. And a database that enforces who sees what, so the answer does not depend on which screen you are looking at.

How Turnaround QC works — turnaroundqc.com/how-it-works