£1m of annual savings through digitisation non-destructive testing process

Our solution

Digital Asset Sharing in Real Time

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 they 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.

Maximising Inspection Efficiency Through Instant Access

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.

Secure Data Storage

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.

eviFile’s Implementation Approach

For DPL, it was critical put an implementation framework to enable us to roll out across the organisation in a rapid timeframe. eviFile also invested additional time in ensuring that the software implementation has a specific project configuration that has ultimate flexibility and user self-management capability.