Assembly digitalisation and digital valve test certificate
Supplier material test certificates arrived in every format imaginable, hydro testing data sat in a vendor database nobody could reach, and the ERP data lived in Excel. We connected all three and made the valve test certificate generate from them.
- less manual effort processing certificates
- 80%less manual effort processing certificates
- faster valve test certificate generation
- 50%faster valve test certificate generation
- disconnected systems joined into one
- 3disconnected systems joined into one
The client is not named on this page. The work, the numbers and the technical detail are described exactly as delivered.
The problem: traceability assembled from three disconnected places
A valve test certificate has to prove where the material came from and how the finished valve performed under test. Both facts existed. Neither was reachable without a person going and getting it — one from a stack of supplier PDFs in inconsistent formats, the other from a testing vendor’s own database.
Unstructured MTCs
Suppliers provided material test certificates in many formats, digital and physical, so extraction and verification were manual and error-prone every single time.
Hydro testing data fragmentation
Automated hydro testing equipment stored its results in an isolated vendor database, requiring manual retrieval before a certificate could be produced.
ERP data disconnection
Assembly order metadata — bill of materials, routing, test documents — was available only as static Excel dumps, which is not something you can query.
Manual torque logging
Traditional torque wrenches had no digital connectivity, so torque values for quality assurance were written down by hand.
Compliance and traceability risk
Certification inconsistencies were not merely inefficient — they carried real exposure to delays and audit failure.
The system we built
The interesting constraint here was that one of the inputs is genuinely unstructured. A supplier’s material test certificate is a document, not a record, and it arrives however that supplier chooses to send it.
Inputs
- Supplier MTCsmixed formats, digital + physical
- Hydro testing databasevendor system
- ERP Excel dumpsassembly order, BOM, routing
- Torque wrenchesBluetooth — in progress
Extraction
- OCRdocument to text
- LLM standardisationinfer + normalise fields
Consolidation
- Queryable production databasereplaces static dumps
- Direct hydro test connectivityno manual retrieval
Output
- Digital valve test certificategenerated, not compiled
- Partial shipment supportper-consignment
- 1
Automated MTC processing
OCR extracts the text and a language model standardises it — inferring which field is which across certificate layouts nobody controls. This is the part that had resisted automation before.
- 2
Hydro testing integration
Direct connectivity to the testing vendor’s database, so results land in the certificate automatically instead of being fetched and retyped.
- 3
ERP data synchronisation
Static Excel dumps transformed into a dynamic, queryable database covering assembly order, BOM and routing metadata.
- 4
Certificate system
Component and standards masters, order import, vendor certificate attachment and partial-shipment support — delivered in phases after the MTC and assembly work landed.
- 5
Torque wrench digitisation
Bluetooth-enabled digital wrenches to capture torque per bolt automatically. In progress — the relationship is still active.
What changed
80% less manual effort
Measured on MTC processing and validation, the step that had consumed the most time per certificate.
50% faster certificate generation
Half the elapsed time, with the data arriving rather than being collected.
No more data mismatches
Hydro testing parameters are included automatically, which removes the class of error that comes from transcribing them.
Improved compliance
End-customer traceability requirements are met by the system rather than by diligence.
A relationship still running
The engagement has continued in phases — assembly digitalisation first, then the full certificate system, now torque digitisation.
Where AI actually earns its place
We are careful about putting language models into a compliance path. Here it earns the position: the input is genuinely unstructured, arriving from suppliers in formats nobody at the plant controls, and every alternative had already been tried.
The extraction is checked against the ERP and hydro test records rather than trusted on its own. Automation that is not verifiable does not belong in a certificate.
Buried in supplier documents?
If compliance means someone reading PDFs and typing what they find into another system, that is a problem worth solving properly. Tell us what your documents look like.