During our process safety audits and engineering reviews for existing processes, the #1 deficiency that we still come across is the lack of piping MI inspections. However, there seems to be a major effort in getting these types of inspections completed as most auditors will now take issue if there are no “official” inspections by a “qualified person” on the process piping. So now they have an audit item they have to close out. And this is where I want to make sure that the money spent is well spent. With the increased demand for inspections, the actual professional inspectors have quite the backlog. This has opened the door to a lot of “want-to-be-inspectors” who offer the service at prices well below market prices. This is very tempting when a business has not budgeted tens of thousands of dollars to perform these critical MI inspections.
My RAGAGEP(s) of choice for piping inspections are API 570 (Program) and 574 (Practice) and these two (2) standards work in harmony to make piping inspection management very manageable.