Standard of Commissioning

[supermarketguy]

Hi All,

I was wondering what all the various parties involved in the industry, wither it be comercial or industrial think about the standards of commissioning.

Now that we in the uk are in the age of the sub contractor and there are a lot of self employed commissioning engineers in the field, does the forum feel this is better in terms of commissioning standards or is it better to have a commissioning engineer directly employed by the company.

I have been a commissioning engineer myself and as all things there are many pro's and con's for both.

[frank]

I would expect that the quality of commissioning is dependant upon the skills of the engineer (technician) who carries out the commissioning.

Defining "commissioning" I would expect it to mean " setting to work to meet the design specification".

Now, if you have an independant guy who works for himself but is employed by the installation company to commission, you would get maybe a 90% approval of the installation, as his repeat business relies on an amount of support for whoever pays the wages.

If you had an engineer directly employed by the installation company doing the commissioning, I think you would get a lesser degree of "non compliance to design" reported as all his loyalties are to the wage payer.

I suppose the ideal senario is to have a totally independant commissioning engineer directly employed by the end user who, I would expect, would give a totally impartial report whether he managed to get the system(s) running correctly first time or even if he found loads of "issues".

[gas_n_go]

IMO its makes no difference what so ever who does it. What matters is the standards that are set in place to live up too, and the follow up that those standards are met. Dosnt matter who does it, just that its done correctly. The biggest stumbling point I notice is the tecnology is rapidly changing and the customers are buying unproven products and are not fully educated on the intriqueces of what they can do or whats involved in converting over. Wheather its in-house or subbed out, I think the industry needs to slow down and install and implement the product thier buying more efficently. I also think the industry as a whole should set higher technical education standards from thier project manners.

[speedo]

As with all sections of our industry there are good, bad and useless. I was lectured to by a " commissioning engineer" of a well known contractor who tried to tell me it was ok to fit external equalised valves to cases and blank off the equalising port. He then told me he had done this at stores all over the country, obviously the service engineers covering those stores would have been delighted to find what he had done. The main reason he did this was because he couldn't be a***d to get the right valves!