PANI and the Role of the Written NDT Procedure

The Programme for the Assessment of NDT in Industry (PANI) was initiated by the UK’s Health & Safety Executive and became a sequence of three projects with the objective of assessing and improving the effectiveness of NDT, and manual ultrasonics in particular. Each project had a particular objective: the first was to provide a measure of the effectiveness of manual ultrasonics as applied in general industry. The report made recommendations, based on industry knowledge and best practice, on the measures that should be taken if a high reliability of inspection was required. The second project then tried to quantify the reliability improvements that would be derived from following these recommendations. Unfortunately, such improvements were swamped by the differences in individual operator performance and so the third project, PANI III, tried to identify how this variability could be reduced. Apart from reliability, a key theme running through these projects is the role of the written procedure. This paper will illustrate, using the PANI results, how the procedure can influence the achieved performance of an inspection and provide recommendations on how procedures should be written to assist the operator in the