Qualifications and certifications

Design deliverables are prepared to be compatible with JORC, NI 43-101 and VALMIN reporting requirements, and engineering complies with Chinese GB codes, Eurocodes, and US and Australian standards. Which standard governs a given project is agreed at the start, because it changes the design basis, the documentation and the review path.

If a certificate matters to your financing or procurement process, ask us for the certificate number and the issuing body and verify it directly. We would rather do that than have a claim taken on trust.

ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 certificates are searchable in IAF CertSearch, the International Accreditation Forum's database of accredited management system certificates. Steel fabrication certification under CSA W47.1 is searchable in the CWB Group's certified companies directory. Those two registers cover four rows and no others: the three management system rows and the welding row. CE marking, ISO 9712, NI 43-101, the laboratory accreditation and the Chinese construction and design licences are not in either register, so the sections below name the document to ask for instead of pretending a lookup exists.

Management system certificates — searchable

What IAF CertSearch returns matters more than a yes or no. You get certificate validity and status, the standard and scheme, the scope of certification, the certified locations, the certification body that issued it, and the accreditation body standing behind that certification body. Two of those fields do the real work. Scope tells you what was audited. Certified locations tell you which site. A group certificate listing a different plant from the one fabricating your mills is not the certificate you think you're reading.

One caution on the register itself. It is populated by certification bodies uploading their data, so coverage is not universal, and a certificate that does not appear is not the same thing as a certificate that does not exist. If a search comes back empty, ask us for the certificate number and the issuing body and put the question to that body directly before you draw a conclusion.

Welding — searchable

CSA W47.1 is administered by the Canadian Welding Bureau, and it certifies the company rather than the product. A certified firm has qualified its welding supervisors and its welding engineers, submitted its welding procedure specifications for review, and tested every welder, welding operator and tack welder for the processes and positions used in production. So the useful question about a fabricated item isn't whether it is CWB approved. It's whether the shop that welded it is the certified entity — and the CWB directory settles that, searching companies certified to W47.1 and the related standards by name, scope of work, standard and country. Equipment manufacturing sets out which base builds what.

NDT personnel — ask for the people, not the company

ISO 9712 is the odd row on that table, because it does not certify a company at all. It is the standard for qualifying and certifying individual non-destructive testing personnel, method by method and level by level. There is no corporate entry to search, and a supplier who answers "we are ISO 9712 certified" has told you nothing you can check.

Ask for the individuals instead: the certificate number, the test method and the level held by each inspector who will examine your equipment, plus the body that certified them. Then run two checks of your own. Are those certificates in force on the dates the inspection is actually carried out. And do the methods on them match the methods your inspection and test plan calls for — a certificate in radiographic testing says nothing about ultrasonic examination, and the two are not substitutes when a weld is in question.

Laboratory accreditation — ask for the scope annex

CNAS accreditation to ISO/IEC 17025 sits inside the ILAC Mutual Recognition Arrangement, whose scope covers testing and calibration laboratories accredited to that standard, so results from a laboratory accredited by a signatory can be recognised internationally — accredited once, accepted everywhere. That arrangement is a recognition framework between accreditation bodies, not a certificate lookup, and recognition does not bless every line on a report. Accreditation runs to a defined scope of methods, and that scope is annexed to the accreditation certificate rather than posted in an international register. Ask us for the certificate together with its scope annex, then read your test programme against it line by line. Methods inside the accredited scope carry the accreditation. Development work reported outside it does not. Both are legitimate, and they carry different weight with a lender.

Chinese construction and design licences — ask for the number and the holder

Neither register above reaches them. They are issued under the Chinese system to a named legal entity, and the entity is the part that gets skipped. Ask for the certificate number and the holder company, then set that name against the company that would sign your contract. The section further down explains what those licences authorise and where that authority stops.

A certificate only earns its keep at the moment someone demands it. Here is the mapping we use when a buyer asks which of these they should actually care about.

That last row is the one that trips people. The Class A general contracting qualification is held by Yantai Xinkuangfu Engineering Management Group, and the design institute holds a Class B qualification in the Chinese metallurgical sector. Both are licences granted under Chinese law to work in China, held by named entities, and neither travels with the drawings.

So where the host country requires a locally licensed practice to seal design documents, the interface has to be drawn in the contract rather than left to goodwill. Four questions decide it. Which packages go to the local practice for review and seal — usually civil, structural, electrical and anything touching a permit — and which stay as our process design basis, mass balance, equipment selection and layout. Who holds the submission to the authority and answers its comments. What format and what code set the local reviewer needs the incoming documents in, because converting a document set to a different code base is a work package in its own right, not a formatting pass. Who carries the cost and the schedule float when comments come back. Settle those before detailed design starts. Discovering at permit stage that nobody was appointed to seal the structural package is a schedule problem wearing a paperwork costume.

One more question, and it is a cheap one to ask. Where a certificate turns out to belong to an affiliate rather than to the company that would sign your contract, ask what the contracting entity is relying on: a multi-site certificate it is itself named in, a subcontract that puts the certified affiliate into the delivery, or nothing written down. Those are three different answers and they do not carry the same weight when something has to be enforced. Nobody worth working with is offended by the question. Technical strength covers the capability sitting behind these credentials; tell us the jurisdiction and we will say which of them travel there and which stop at the border.