Forged Operations · Nuclear supply chain
The quality program that gets you on the bid list and through the audit. Document control, inspection and test plans, corrective actions, training records and traceability in one system, so a small quality team can carry CSA N299 and NQA-1 requirements without a quality department to run them.
18 questions, mapped to the NQA-1 requirements. Your score and gap list open as soon as you tell us where to send the report.
The opportunity
Between 2013 and 2019 the number of companies holding a nuclear quality accreditation fell from 395 to 270, and then refurbishments, new build and SMRs all started buying at once. Primes are looking for qualified suppliers. Qualification is the hard part: controlled documents, traceability, ITPs, training records and corrective actions, usually run out of a shared drive and one overloaded quality manager.
When the utility or the prime shows up, the document, the certificate and the training record they ask for are current, controlled, and retrievable while they wait. Not reconstructed from binders over three days.
Related: Auditing & Assessment, Records Management, Training & Qualification
Products built across divisions and delivered from one. There is a single program, a single document set and a single set of records behind all of it, so what a customer sees does not depend on which plant made the part.
Related: Document Control, Configuration Management
Documents move from draft to review to published, with every approval recorded against the revision. The inspection and test plan, the quality plan and the record package that ships with the item are what a prime waits on, so turning them round quickly is what gets you the next package of work.
Carrying CSA N299, NQA-1 and ISO 19443 at once looks like a headcount problem right up until the assembly work goes away. The requirements overlap heavily; maintained once, one record answers the matching requirement in each.
Related: CSA N299, NQA-1, ISO 19443, CFSI Prevention
The gap, concretely
Eight requests that come up in almost every nuclear supplier survey. The middle column is the honest answer the first time through.
| The request | Typical answer today | What it should take |
|---|---|---|
| “The approved supplier list, and the evidence behind three of them.” | A spreadsheet, plus a hunt through email for the last survey report. | Each supplier carries its approved scope, its expiry, and the evidence behind it. |
| “Which drawing revision was used to make this part?” | Check the shared drive, then check whether the shop copy matched. | The revision in force at the time, and the record of who held it. |
| “Was the person who signed this inspection qualified to?” | Training binder, cross-referenced by hand against the signature. | Qualification checked against the sign-off at the moment it happened. |
| “Every nonconformance on this product line, and its disposition.” | The NCR log, minus the ones handled informally. | One list, each with its disposition, cause, and the action that closed it. |
| “Prove this gauge was in calibration when it measured our part.” | Certificates in a folder, matched to dates by hand. | Calibration status on the measurement date, and the parts affected if it lapsed. |
| “The certificate of conformance and the material test report for this heat.” | A PDF in a supplier folder, traced to the part by whoever remembers. | Certificate and MTR attached to the item, the heat, and the order. |
| “The ITP for this part, and the signed hold points.” | A plan in the job folder, with sign-offs on a printed copy. | The plan, its hold and witness points, and who released each one. |
| “Where are the records for the job you shipped us in 2023?” | Several days of assembly, if the people involved are still here. | An evidence package assembled on request, traceable to source records. |
The pattern is the same in every row. The process exists. The evidence that it ran is what has to be reconstructed, and reconstruction under audit is where findings come from.
Lewis · the AI quality manager for nuclear
Between the letter and the survey date, the work is finding and connecting what already exists. Lewis does that part, and your team signs off on it.
Ask for the evidence on a part number and it comes back whole, traceable to source records.
Files each page to the right procedure, checklist or critical characteristic.
Turns a finding into a drafted cause analysis and response, ready for your review.
Built by operators, in production with
Built by engineers out of Ontario Power Generation, so it was designed against what the organizations running the surveys expect. Each customer runs its own isolated instance, in our cloud, in yours, or on-premise and air-gapped.
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Questions
A survey team checks that your program exists on paper, is approved, and is followed in practice. They sample: procurement documents, calibration records for the gauges used on their parts, training records for whoever signed the inspection, nonconformances and their dispositions. The finding is rarely that a process is missing. It is that it cannot be evidenced.
It depends on who is buying and where. CSA N299 is the Canadian standard for supply to nuclear power plants, in four categories graded by safety significance. NQA-1 is the ASME standard used across North America and how suppliers show they meet 10 CFR 50 Appendix B. ISO 19443 applies ISO 9001 to nuclear-safety supply. Your customer's purchase order names the one that applies.
It is the process of accepting a commercially available item for safety-related use by identifying its critical characteristics and verifying them. It lets you buy a commercial part and put it into safety-related service without a nuclear-qualified supplier for it.
CSA N299 has four categories graded by the safety significance of what you supply, not by the size of your company. N299.1 carries the fullest program, N299.4 the lightest. Your customer's purchase order names the category, because the classification belongs to the item, not to you.
Eighteen questions against the NQA-1 requirements, with a standard selector so the score reflects what you actually supply. Your result appears on screen.
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